Museums as Places of Pleasure

On letting yourself love what you love

When my son was a toddler and I would ask him if he wanted to visit to the local science museum, he would get really excited and say, “Yeah! We can press all the buttons!”

This kid has always known what he loves.

It can be harder for adults to do that, to listen to that little voice that tells us how we actually want to engage with our environments.

Museums can be ripe places to practice getting in touch with pleasure. So many of us have internalized messages about how we should behave in those spaces (including yours truly, who is getting a literal doctorate in Museum Studies). This makes museums wonderful training grounds to practice navigating that pull between what we feel like we should be doing and what we actually want to do.

Next time you find yourself in a museum (or any other place where you have internalized ideas of how you should behave), check in with yourself to figure out what would feel good.

And then do it¹.

If you, like my son, want to go to a museum mainly for the buttons on the elevators and interactive exhibits, that’s 100% valid.

If you want to look only for the color green in paintings, go for it.

If you want play moody piano music on your headphones and think your thoughts while strolling around a pretty place, how fun.

If you only want to visit for the fancy café, more power to you.

If you want to go to an exhibition and read all the wall labels and learn something new… guess what, that’s good, too.

Because here’s the thing: you get to make your own rules about how you pay attention. In museums, in your life.

And it is a delicious and powerful act to know how you actually want to engage with what’s around you,

and then to

let yourself

do it.

---

Reader, I had an email queued up for today with a title along the lines of PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN, and I scrapped it instead for these reflections on pleasure. I feel like that is a good snapshot of my brain lately. Something has shifted internally, and I have this hunch that if I don’t take joy seriously, and urgently, I might implode.

So.

I have been letting myself love what I love. I put an Easter lily on my desk. Bought a bag of gummy worms at the pharmacy. Binged a novel in a weekend. Cloud gazed from a bench in the forest. Accidentally joined a board.

I am getting back in touch with my belly laugh.

What could be the places of pleasure in your daily life? The grocery store, the morning commute, the kitchen sink, the waiting room, an unexpected pool of sunshine? Go conduct some pleasure research and share your results here:

(And keep an eye out for PAIN PAIN PAIN etc. coming to your inbox at a future date, you won’t want to miss it.)

Wishing you pleasure that surprises you,

P.S. If you know someone who needs some encouragement to conduct their own pleasure research, feel free to forward this email, share it on social media, or restack it. The biggest way to support my writing is by sharing it - thanks!

1. (Unless that means touching the objects. Or bothering other people. Don’t do that.)