In “Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays”, @joanwestenberg writes:
The ratio is roughly 19:1 in favor of the mundane. So we get to a question worth sitting with: Do you actually like your average Monday?
I like this question a lot. There’s a lot of mundane ahead for all of us. Wherever you are in life, there are probably a lot of Mondays ahead, so the more you like them the more you will end up liking your life. Do I get a good night’s sleep? Seven times as many nights coming along as Mondays. Do I enjoy what I eat? Two or three times as many meals coming as days. Small improvements in any one of those areas will pay off handsomely for me in the long run.
Three years back I took a hard look at how well I was sleeping and what if anything I could do to improve that. I found a pillow I liked, not cheap, but one I enjoy a lot more than its predecessor, every night since then and for many nights to come. I switched from a heavy quilt to a down comforter, and night cramps went away. I tried a quality body pillow — it didn’t work for me, but it was worth $100 to find that out. I wasn’t ready to explore the world of very expensive mattresses, but I thought it was worth a few hundred dollars to try a memory foam mattress topper — that worked great, and I not only sleep better but it will extend the life of my old and mid mattress significantly. Some money, some effort, but I’ve experienced benefits every night since and will from now on.
As I enter my declining years I find myself sitting more and more, and both my Aeron office chair and fairly nice couch would cause me pain after an hour or so. Two months ago I paid $1000 for a LiberNovo Omni office chair, and I can confidently say “problem solved”, I can sit in it for hours and have to remind myself to get up and move around. For Christmas I bought myself an insanely expensive Ekornes Stressless recliner — I won’t mention the price, let’s just say I’ll need to live at least ten years to get the per-day price under a dollar — this was partly an indulgence, since I love leather furniture as well as the Scandinavian look — but it also solved my living-room problem, I can now sit and read or watch TV for hours if I like.
After ten years of not eating carbs, this spring I decided to experiment with adding some back, specifically oatmeal for breakfast which I remembered loving beyond all reason. I remembered correctly, and for six months or so I had it every morning — just rolled oats and some sweetener with boiling water poured over, wait five minutes and eat. (Well, some cream too.) Enjoyed it a lot, never got bored, but late last year I thought it would be worth experimenting with porridge variations, to see if other grains or preparation techniques might be even more enjoyable. I bought some off-the-shelf options — cream of wheat, cream of rice, grits — decided I liked the variety of grains and grinds a lot but the price not so much, since these were niche products.
And it doesn’t take much exploring to find people rhapsodizing about homemade, the much better flavor and the possible health benefits. Which mainly requires a grain crusher. A piece of equipment that seems very expensive to me, at least for the function it performs. But then I thought: lots and lots of breakfasts ahead, and if I can make the average breakfast even a bit more enjoyable, that’s a lot of enjoyment in total. So I went ahead and spent $250 on a quality grain flaker. No regrets! There are lots of grain varieties out there, each of which can be made into porridge several different ways. I’ll enjoy the experimental phase where I decide which variants I like the best, after which I look forward to many, many very pleasurable breakfasts.
Occasional peak experience? Meh. Give me a steady stream of good ones, please.