This column will change your life: Small pleasures

We can all agree, presumably, that learning to appreciate life’s smaller pleasures – a sunset, a cup of coffee, the sight of a newborn lamb drinking a cup of coffee at sunset – is a highly beneficial thing. And yet there’s something uniquely aggravating about being instructed, whether by books, blogs or well-meaning friends, to savour such moments. Run barefoot through grass, we’re urged. Smell the morning air! Relish a piece of chocolate! All admirable, but perhaps the problem is that we must discover our own pleasures for ourselves; perhaps it’s that the advice can sound smug.

Who’d dissent, for example, from Pasricha’s observation that there’s weirdly disproportionate enjoyment, when hauling luggage or shopping, in “picking up something that turns out to be a lot lighter than you expected”? Or “dropping your cellphone on the sidewalk and then realising it’s totally fine”?