Ian Bogost describes gratification as the immediate delight of sensory experience. It is about noticing, sensing, and enjoying the small things in life. Best of all, most of them are free.
Some small pleasures I enjoy when I notice them:
- Feeling the rain on my umbrella
- Shaving with a razor blade
- Looking at the blue sky. Seeing the full moon while jogging
- Driving at night. The sound of silence
- Replacing my badminton racket grip
- Shooting a basketball
- Drawing. The sound of pen on paper
- Feeling the piano keys after a long holiday
- Sipping whisky in the afternoon
- Cracking open pistachios
- Cleaning my backpack or shoes, or rearranging and folding my clothes
- A warm coffee after ice bath. Coffee aroma
- Browsing stationery, feeling the pages, and noticing the different designs
- A massage therapist hitting the right spot with just the right pressure
- Drinking a cold highball or sake with friends over izakaya food after pick-up basketball
- Practicing Wing Chun by the sea while listening to the waves
- Having gelato with my kids after a hike or a workout
The more we notice and appreciate the little things in life, the more meaningful and precious even ordinary, mundane moments become.
Excerpts:
Every day, you sustain a huge volume of encounters with small stuff, which, for the purpose of this book, I’m defining as any and all of the things you encounter with your senses and control with your body (or with tools and equipment), and which inspire delight in so doing.
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The more you allow yourself to accept the weird, wonderful gifts that ordinary life constantly offers, the more their offerings will feel desirable, even transformative.
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Happiness is overarching, big-picture contentment. Satisfaction is the pride in accomplishment. Gratification is the sensory enchantment of everyday life.
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You have to work hard to be happy, and even to be satisfied. But gratification doesn’t require any work. Instead, feeling gratified involves a different pre-requisite: giving yourself permission to fully experience the sensory life that is always happening to you anyway.
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Humor offers a lesson for feeling more gratified: The more open you are to letting it happen to you, the more receptive you become to it.
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Learning to celebrate the gratifying moments that arise when your senses connect to the world also makes the moments more frequent and natural.
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Gratification is a gift the natural and designed environment offers to you for free.
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I see satisfaction as the pride that arises from a big accomplishment, and gratification as the immediate delight of sensory experience.
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Think of ASMR as both a guide and permission to connect a little bit more with the ordinary tactile experiences that produce gratification. It’s okay to run your hands across the clothing in your closet before choosing an item to wear. It’s okay to smooth the bedsheet, even if you don’t make the bed. Holding the coffee cup–feeling its warmth and eliciting a deep sound from its hollow by tapping it–is also part of the reason you drink coffee, not just to wake up for another day at a job that might or might not make you happy.
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Whether in the pursuit of happiness or satisfaction, wealth or power, accomplishments or objectives, a default attitude orients you toward the big stuff. And big stuff is almost always future stuff: reaching a raise or the next rank in your job, moving your relationship to the next level, helping your kids achieve their potential, improving your body through exercise or your mind through knowledge, and so on.
Reflecting on this state of affairs on our podcast, Oliver Burkeman said that one thing that helps him avoid that drive toward a constant, instrumentalist focus on the big stuff is “bringing attention to the senses. You know, just literally paying attention to sights, sounds, touch, smell, whatever, is a way of reducing the power that otherwise naturally goes to kind of compulsive thought.” The senses are where gratification happens.
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These things aren’t important, not each one on its own. But all together, the small stuff infuses every beat of your life. Some moments are milestones, but most are instants. Every one of them wants to whisper a secret.
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