Trying to work out why I get so much enjoyment from watching other people do things I can’t do I type into Google,
“Why do we enjoy….”
and before I can finish I notice the first suggested autofill,
“spicy food”
This seems like an odd thing to question, but not as odd as an offering a little further down the list,
I finish typing.
“Why do we enjoy watching other people do things we can’t do?”
Social comparison theory argues I do it to assess my own abilities and self-worth and that it might inspire me to improve my own skills.
I recall a time in woodwork at school when we were asked to simply plane a piece of wood until it was flat and how I planed mine away to nothing.
I’d started thinking about the attraction of watching experts while enjoying the final of “The Great Pottery Throwdown” on TV, a show in which amateur potters compete to be crowned Britain’s best, well, amateur potter.
I love the show but I know I would be a catastrophic potter, so comparison theory might also help me to accept my limits and therefore avoid unnecessary humiliation.
Mirror neuron theory explains that neurons in our brains fire similarly whether we are doing something ourselves or watching someone else doing it, so witnessing expertise in someone else gives us a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction similar to that we would feel if we had done it ourselves.
Perhaps that’s why porn is so popular.
Evolutionary theory has the explanation which feels most appropriate for me in that watching other people excel at something is the way in which we would have been inspired to gain new skills through our evolution and thus increased our chances of survival.
My interests are many and varied but I often feel I lack the application to do any of them expertly.
I raised this once in my own therapy.
“I can do lots of things but most of them end up reminding me of my own incompetence because I can’t do them well enough.”
I noted my therapist’s apparent lack of interest in dissuading me.
Now that I think about it I chose a therapist who was well-read and well-travelled, musically more proficient than me, obviously more experienced therapeutically, and with whom I would spend the majority of my sessions discussing the poetry, books, or writers he had mostly introduced me to.
At the time I wondered what I was getting from therapy that I wouldn’t have been able to get from listening to BBC Radio 4 but now it seems obvious.
A poem called, “There’s A Hole In My Sidewalk,” serves as a useful metaphor for therapeutic work.
In it, the writer, Portia Nelson, describes falling into unseen holes that, over time, become visible but still irresistible to stumble into, until eventually some of them are seen and avoided.
Clunky, imperfect, often painfully slow and imperceptible progress. Life, in other words.
Just because we are aware of anxiety, depression, or our tendency towards toxic relationships, doesn’t mean we can suddenly do anything to prevent them.
There is a gap, sometimes interminable, between understanding and action, but just recognising the “holes” is still growing.
When I watch someone throwing a pot I may not be able to do it myself but it reminds me of the purpose and value of striving.
In a Q&A about perfectionism with writer and therapist Katherine Morgan Schafler on Holly Whitaker’s endlessly enlightening substack, Schafler describes how she threw a “trying party” in the midst of writing her book rather than waiting until she had completed it.
There is as much to celebrate in the movement towards a goal as there is in the arrival at it which is just as well considering life is mostly travelling between conclusions without many triumphant arrivals.
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