This all very much resonates with me. (I saw the movie Defending Your Life at a young age, and there’s a scene where Rip Torn, playing an angel, is eating at a restaurant in heaven that serves everything you could ever imagine or desire. As I recall, he ordered “the usual”, and it was a plate of literal horse shit. How long would you have to exist for that to be what you actually wanted? That really stuck with me: a perfect being would love everything.)

Anyway, country music: I always hated it, but when I started learning how to play the guitar, suddenly I found myself liking all kinds of music I hadn’t cared for previously, even country! It wasn’t even a situation where I wanted to want to like country music; it just sort of happened. Anything with a guitar just sort of hits different now.

Some thoughts:

1. One of my kids will clearly decide if they like a new food or not long before it touches their tongue. It seems unlikely that she will have completely outgrown doing that by the time she is 18

2. Throwing yourself into something more fully can qualitatively change the experience. Wallflowers may not enjoy social events; people awkwardly half-participating in things due to embarrassment can be less happy than both those who participate whole-heartedly and those who abstain.

3. I’ll treat this as my reminder to retry reading Moby Dick (which I do about once-per-decade in case I start enjoy it like so many of those in my social circles)

I try to this and I’ve had varying degrees of success. I have more success with food and alcohol, but I’m far from picky when it comes to that stuff. I have tried to do this a lot with music and the results are all over the place. I have listened to something like 75+ hip hop albums now and I still don’t like most of it. I also have tried with Oasis and just still hate them. But, like nearly every white guy my age, I have become way more forgiving of pop music than I was in my teens and 20s and a lot of that comes from deliberate exposure. (I haven’t listened to the radio regularly in decades so it has to be deliberate.)

I think this is a good attitude to have, and one that I try to apply as much as possible. It’s often really hard to do because you can become so invested in not having a good time that in the moment it doesn’t look like you have a choice, but you do.

One approach that sometimes works for me is to Ben franklin yourself. You have much more control over how you act then how you feel. If you perform enjoying something then you often end up actually enjoying it, at least a bit. I think this is how a lot of CBT works as well. Of course, you still have to see past your initial distaste and decide to try to like it, but once you’re there this technique can be pretty useful.