[bambax]

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things.

I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious.

If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it.

I can tolerate bad books much more than bad movies. I can't stand a bad movie, it makes me upset and impatient: I don't really like movies. People who do, watch everything they can, the good and the bad alike. Etc.

If you truly don't know what you love, see if you can get interested in bad instances of things; if you like something when it's bad, you'll love the good version of it.

[quickthrower2]

Not really. Having taste doesn’t mean you don’t like it. You can really like subsets of things that suit your taste. “You don’t like interior design unless you get lit by prison cell decor”

[Doxin]

I bet someone deep into interior design could hold some really firm opinions on prison cell decor. Presumably they wouldn't think prison cells are the pinnacle of interior design, but it's not like there's no design there at all.

[nonrandomstring]

Definitely "love" in its casual usage, is very fickle. You can turn something you love into something you hate by over-doing it.

Maybe the best way to kill something you love is to make it into work in the first place. There's a good argument for keeping the things you really savour a little at arms-length.

One psychological idea I found immensely helpful but hard to digest is the relation between love and hate; Love and hate are not opposites, but proximate. Love can easily flip to hate and vice versa. They're from a vector of two circuits, arousal and pleasure/displeasure. The opposite of love (and hate) is indifference. Socially, we worry about "hate speech" when a much more dangerous state of mind is blank faced indifference. ( Most of what I'm saying is just Erich Fromm [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

[nyanpasu64]

Socially I'm more worried about targeted harassment, legal threats to safety, and murder than indifference to my existence.

[lordgrenville]

I would qualify this. If you like movies, you like all sorts of movies. You can enjoy well-done schlock horror as much as experimental Thai drama. But you still have a sense of good and bad, and you don't want to sit through something done badly in terms of what it's trying to achieve. Same with food: if you like Chinese food you maybe like all sorts of tastes, and high-end to low-end, but you don't need to like it when it's bad. Someone who likes all movies or Chinese food that they encounter doesn't actually like that thing - they just don't care enough about it.

[bambax]

I'm not saying to love something is to be devoid of taste or incapable of sorting the bad from the good. I'm saying it means being able to suffer the bad, to sit through a bad movie until the end, in the hunt for any passable scene.

[dudul]

Makes no sense to me. It seems totally possible to me to love movies without enjoying wasting 2h watching a poorly made film.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

> I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food

Hi, I’m a Chinese person. WTF do you mean by this? Are you seriously saying you love Chinese food (also what do you mean, Chinese food? What provinces? What regions?) when it’s shit? You’ll happily eat stale bao, rotten meat dumplings, moldy rice? What is “stinky”: durian? Something else?

[bambax]

Sorry if this came out as insensitive. I've never been to China. By Chinese food I mean food that is available in Chinese restaurants in Europe where I live. By bad Chinese food I mean food that isn't fresh, that's dry, that has obviously been reheated more than once. I don't mean rotten exactly (although it can happen).

[makeitshine]

While I can understand the irritation, the tone of your response seems excessive for someone talking about food.