Don't Like - Let People Enjoy Things

On February 3rd, 2016 a cartoon was published on Facebook featuring one person clamping another person’s mouth shut and saying, “Let people enjoy things.” This phrase has since become a wide-ranging rallying call that at its best urges people to be less snarky and at its worst tries to erase any and all criticism. When “Let people enjoy things” refers to innocuous things like drinking pumpkin spice lattes or doing Fortnite dances it’s doing good. When it tries to shut down any discussion of big, thorny, important issues on any number of sociocultural, political topics it’s actively harmful. Those problems have already been covered very well in The Baffler and VOX. However, there is one point that seems to be missing from this conversation, which is that criticism doesn’t stop people from enjoying things. That’s just not how criticism works. It isn’t an edict that you must obey lest the furious gods of good taste sentence you to eternal damnation. Rather, it provides a contrasting point of view that forces you to settle and then resettle your own opinions. That should not be confused with being an antagonistic jerk around a bunch of people who enjoy something you can’t stand. The problem of not liking Marvel movies and hating what the MCU and Disney have done to the modern movie industry is different than hanging outside Comicon to make videos of you laughing at nerds. Likewise, it is one thing to comment on the premium mediocrity of truffle oil and another to go up to someone in a restaurant and tell them they’re a fake foodie. In this way, the greatest problem with “Let people enjoy things” is that it accidentally strips away the agency from the people it wants to protect. That’s not enjoyable at all.