Why Small Pleasures Are a Big D.

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We're surrounded by some powerful ideas about the sort of things that will make us happy. We tend to think that really to deliver satisfaction, the pleasures we should aim for need to be rare – we've inherited a romantic suspicion of the ordinary, which is taken to be mediocre, dull and uninspiring, and work with a corresponding assumption that things that are unique, hard to find, exotic, or unfamiliar are naturally fitted to delight us more.



Then we want things to be expensive, we like economic endorsement. If something is cheap or free, it's a little harder to appreciate. The pineapple, for instance, dropped off a lot of people's wish list of fruit when its price fell from exorbitant (they used to cost the equivalent of hundreds of pounds) to unremarkable. Caviar continues to sound somehow more interesting than chicken eggs.



Then we want things to be famous. In a fascinating experiment, a celebrated violinist once donned scruffy clothes and busked at a street corner and was largely ignored, though people would flock to the world's great concert halls to hear just the same man play just the same pieces.



Lastly, we want things to be large-scale. We are mostly focused on big schemes that we hope will deliver enjoyment: marriage, career, travel, getting a new house. These approaches aren't entirely wrong, but unwittingly, they collectively exhibit a vicious and unhelpful bias against the cheap, the easily available, the ordinary the familiar and the small-scale.



And yet, the paradoxical and cheering aspect of pleasure is how weird and promiscuous it can prove to be. It doesn't neatly collect in the most expensive boutiques. It can refuse to stick with us on fancy holidays. It is remarkably vulnerable to emotional trouble, sulks and casual bad moods. A fight that began with a small disagreement about how to pronounce a word can end up destroying every benefit of a five-star resort.

A pleasure may look very minor – eating a fig, having a bath, whispering in bed in the dark, talking to a grandparent, or scanning through old photos of when you were a child, and yet these pleasures can be anything but small: if properly grasped and elaborated upon, these sort of activities may be among the most moving and satisfying we can have.