The one where I figure out in real time whether I enjoy climbing

About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call “climbing.”

Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine to form “routes,” and you can climb short ones with no ropes (“bouldering”) or longer (thus, higher) ones with a rope running from a harness you wear, up through an anchor installed at the top of the route, and back down to someone on the ground who takes up the slack as you climb and then lowers you back to the ground when you’re finished (“top-roping”). You can also do something more advanced (“lead climbing”) where there is no anchor at the top and the person at the bottom doesn’t take in slack as you climb but rather gives you slack as you climb higher with your own rope, which you attach to anchors fixed along the route as you go. (This one I haven’t tried, might never.)[1]

I started doing this because a friend of mine had just lost her spouse, with whom she had climbed regularly. It’s kind of a buddy sport, and I liked the idea of spending more time with this friend, as well as with two other friends who were already climbing together regularly. So we formed a climbing foursome, me the clear novice, but no matter: I learned how to be the person at the bottom, which you can safely do with no climbing skills at all, so in the confines of a “climbing gym” where the advanced courses are right next to the ones that have you basically climbing the rungs of a ladder, my being much worse than the others didn’t hold them back too much. (I did fail my first test to be a licensed person-holding-the-rope-at-the-bottom, but that actually was a great thing to have happened to me, for reasons I can explain in a different post. I passed on my second attempt and have been safely hoisting people up and lowering people down walls ever since.)

My climbing was and is mostly motivated by reasons extrinsic to the actual climbing. I really enjoy spending time with these friends, and I like being with them as they do something they all clearly love and excel at. Those reasons are more than enough for me to want to continue doing this. But I often do idly wonder: Do I, additionally, enjoy climbing?

Here are some data points:

• I rarely feel excited leading up to climbing. I am excited to see my friends, sometimes pleasantly hopeful that I’ll manage to complete a new route. But I’m not psyched out of my mind to get into that gym. I have been known to drag feet.
• I do usually feel glad that I went after the fact. I like the fatigue in my arms and sometimes the feeling of satisfaction when I’ve done something hard. I don’t feel too disappointed when I fail, either. I just generally feel glad to have done it.
• But. I think my feelings of wellbeing post-climbing are less down to the satisfying fatigue or satisfying accomplishment or satisfying anything-related-to-climbing. I think I mostly feel good because I’ve just spent time with friends.
• I have gone climbing by myself on occasion, but note: People keep telling me that women my age need to lift weights, and they have weights at the climbing gym, which I use regularly before I climb. I suspect that some of what brings me to the gym and makes me feel satisfied afterward is renewed hope about my bone density!

I’ve already said that friendship (and bone density) are enough to make me want to continue climbing. But in addition to having sufficient reason to continue climbing, do I actually enjoy it?

When I sat down to write this, I was hoping just to pose a question about how we figure out if we enjoy something. But while writing, a comparison came to mind, which I now find illuminating: The patterns I just bulleted closely match what I see from my kid when he participates in sports. He’s very self-critical, he’s often not the best athlete on the field (that’s just numbers), and his team doesn’t always win. So, participation in sports means he spends a lot of time feeling like he messed up, let his team down, etc. And that means:

• He often doesn’t want to go to his practice or game in the run-up to it.
• He usually is happy and glad he went after he does.
• But, that post-game happiness is plausibly down to things just as extrinsic to the sport as the things that elevate my mood after climbing: He’s been with friends; he’s been physically active; sometimes his team won; sometimes he gets ice cream; etc.
• What drives him to his sports in the day-to-day is often not confidence that he’ll have fun, but rather his sense that he committed to being there, his hope that his team will win…things I again regard as extrinsic to the actual playing of the sport.

Those data points are a fairly good match with mine. And yet, if asked, I would answer with confidence that my kid does enjoy the sports in question. I would answer affirmatively because when he gets out of his way and just plays, he is happy while doing it. It seems, then, that when I ask myself whether he enjoys some activity, I’m asking something like this: When he really does it, does he experience happiness, elation, joy, or exuberance?

Yet when I ask myself if I enjoy climbing, I’m evidently asking a different question.

I think my adult version of the enjoyment question incorporates two considerations that my kid version of the question abstracts away: First, by asking whether my kid is happy, elated, etc. when he just plays, I am setting aside questions about how much of the time he is in that state of just playing. Second, when I ask simply whether my kid experiences those things, I am setting aside questions about opportunity costs, including in the domain of enjoyment itself: I’m not asking whether he could be experiencing more enjoyment if he were doing something else. In contrast, when I ask myself if I enjoy climbing, I’m thinking about how little of the time spent “climbing” is actually time on the wall, climbing. There’s the commute, the putting on of the shoes and harness, the turns spent being the person holding the rope at the bottom. I factor all that in as I contemplate the question of my enjoyment. I’m also factoring in that the time I spend climbing is time I am not being productive. Time not being productive is precious. So, when I ask if I enjoy climbing, I’m treating it as relevant whether something else would bring more happiness, elation, joy, or exuberance, or a better volume of those feelings per increment of time spent.

In short, I now think that when I ask about kid enjoyment, I’m doing ideal theory, whereas when I ask about adult enjoyment (or at least my adult enjoyment), I’m doing non-ideal theory. While that might seem at first to make some sense, I have a hunch that the asymmetry actually reveals that I’m making a mistake. When we ask what we should do, whether we should pursue some hobby, we should ask mostly without abstracting away the real-world details. We should incorporate those details when we ask the practical question of what to do or keep doing, for both kids and adults. If my kid felt joy and exuberance but only for ten seconds over the course of an entire season of soccer, and if he hated going to practice every other day, probably we should look for a new activity! But my question wasn’t the practical question of whether to keep climbing: I already knew I had sufficient reason to continue. I just wanted to know whether I enjoy the activity.

And surely, the definition of enjoyment shouldn’t be different between kids and adults, even if the things that bring us enjoyment clearly should vary across developmental stages. To treat the meaning of enjoyment as different seems like an objectionable equivocation.

If I am so confident that my kid enjoys soccer because when he actually plays, he experiences happiness, elation, joy, and exuberance, then I should apply that same standard, with its abstractions, to the question when I ask it of my own enjoyment. In neither case will my answer settle the practical question. (As our most (in)famous ideal theorist was always careful to remind us, ideal theory will not tell us directly what to do in less happy circumstances.) But if, setting aside the practical question, I just want to learn something about my own enjoyment, I should ask: Do I experience happiness, elation, joy, and exuberance when I actually engage in climbing? And the answer is, I do! I experience those things partly because when I’m climbing, I’m working and concentrating far too hard to worry about optimizing my enjoyment, so I’m definitely not thinking about what I might be enjoying more. And, while there might be a lot of time not climbing when you go climbing, the time on the wall is, like the time just shooting the shit with my friends, something that brings happiness , elation, joy, and exuberance (if not all at once!).

(I’m experiencing those things right now, too, first because I just sorted something out to my own satisfaction using reflective equilibrium, and I definitely enjoy doing that. I also gave myself a visceral reminder of why we should keep writing without AI. The question of whether I enjoy climbing is not a matter of great importance, but I did want to know the answer, and I never would have sorted it out without messily writing through the thoughts on my own.)

Now, suppose I’m right. Suppose this journey has revealed that I (someone who clearly thinks way too much about whether I’m properly enjoying what’s meant to be enjoyable) slipped into the mistake of defining the very term enjoyment in a way that shifts depending on the subject I’m asking about. Here’s the curiosity I’m left with: Does this reflect a more general tendency? Do we adults do too much nonideal theory when we ask what we enjoy? When we reflect on our enjoyment, are we too often also already anticipating the practical question—the one that we rightly locate in nonideal theory—of what we should do?

[1] I’m sure I’m explaining this badly and/or incorrectly. Those in the know, please correct me!