Moving Along The Effort Curve

A weird thing I have noticed as of late: how fun things are is frequently and easily shifted with how much effort I invest in it. Trying harder at something frequently makes it more fun to do, it just now takes more energy. Similarly, sometimes things I feel compelled to invest a lot of energy into aren’t fun for that reason, but half-assing it (while still accomplishing the objective) makes them more fun again.

It has become a sort of knob to tweak to make life better, an axis on the activity matrix to tinker with to make life better, when it works.

As a concrete example, cooking: It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to resent the presence of, since most people in broadly-western lives need to do so for almost every meal. You gradually have a sort of repertoire of things you can make without too much thought, things you keep the ingredients around for, so you can just make them when you need to eat food in order to not die.¹ It is also easy to get sick of those default meals, and then you have to try to find more stuff again, and so on.

Moving the effort level up then could mean any of these:

• Acquiring/reviewing cook books for new ideas
• Making sketches and plans for dishes made from separate components
• Unusually time-intense preperations (i.e. dry-aging, fermenting, brining)
• Acquiring produce from a different vendor and seeing how it changes things.

Doing that generally changes the experience in a significant way, and often in a good way. It’s novelty in a way that lets you meaningfully improve something routine. I also tend to be able to liberally steal techniques and tricks from very fancy cooking for regular cooking²

Often the main way I want the dial to turn on effort is down, but that tends to make everything quite beige and turns things that are fun into functionalist affairs that do their job, but have had the enjoyment optmised out. Deliberately throwing way more effort than strictly required often lets me enjoy the routine version again, with some more information and a slightly changed perspective.

In short, try tinkering with moving the effort-invested slider up, rather than down. When you do that, try going way up on the effort invested, rather than slightly up, and I think you might learn something about something you were already treating as bland routine.