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Willemijn van Dolen | Please enjoy? ‘I’ll decide that for myself,’ my friend said
What if a waiter cheerfully wishes you “enjoy” when you’re having a terrible day and simply aren’t in the mood to enjoy anything? Columnist Willemijn van Dolen concludes that enjoyment is difficult to force. “The harder you try to summon or hold on to positive feelings, the more likely they are to disappear from view.”
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This summer, I was sitting on a terrace with a friend. We had both just returned from holiday and had arranged to catch up. A young waiter put our order down on the table and cheerfully said, “Enjoy.”
Instruction
As he walked away, my friend muttered, “I’ll decide that for myself.” I burst out laughing. “Did you get out of bed on the wrong side this morning?”
“No,” she said, “but I hear this several times a day these days. At the bakery, on a terrace, at the cinema, at Artis, and even a Wi-Fi network was called that recently. And it does feel like an instruction. Maybe I’m sitting here feeling absolutely miserable and I don’t want to enjoy myself at all.”
Research appears to support her feeling. What happens is that “enjoy” — however well-intentioned — can trigger us to start evaluating the situation. Until that moment, we were simply sitting in the sunshine, enjoying ourselves, and listening to the laughter from the table next to us. A cheerful “enjoy” then gives us the starting signal to assess whether we actually are enjoying ourselves.
Own experience
And once you start seeing happiness or pleasure as a goal, you begin checking whether you’re actually managing to enjoy yourself. The moment you start asking yourself those questions, you are no longer focused on your drink, feeling the warmth of the sun, or the conversation. You are busy evaluating your own experience: Did we choose the right table, or is there more sun over in that corner? Should we have ordered some bitterballen? Are they perhaps having more fun than we are?
Positive feelings are difficult to force. The harder you try to summon or hold on to them, the more likely they are to disappear. Researchers have shown that wanting to be happy is not a problem, but once we start monitoring our happiness, we become less satisfied. You become a kind of manager of your own happiness. This is known as concern for happiness. It isn’t striving for happiness itself, but monitoring whether we are happy, that makes people less satisfied and sometimes even gloomy.
But what should that young waiter say instead? “Whatever, figure it out yourself” isn’t exactly ideal either. Perhaps “Here you are” – and nothing more – would be best.
The thing is, as a customer sitting on a terrace, you have no control over the waiter’s choice of words. So my friend and I started coming up with possible responses of our own: “I’ll do my best, but I’m not making any promises,” “No chance, my bike was just stolen,” and variations that became increasingly ridiculous. We were having so much fun that we couldn’t wait for our bitterballen to arrive.
So perhaps “enjoy” did end up bringing us quite a bit of pleasure and happiness after all!
