What Are Your Guilty Displeasures?

When disliking something clashes with your identity

Mosaic of the Muses, including Homer discussing with the Muse of epic poetry; found in Luxembourg (c. 240)

A guilty pleasure is something you genuinely like, but that clashes with your self image. For example, you might really be a fan of Paris Hilton, but feel that you’re the kind of person who should not be a fan of Paris Hilton. If you ever tell someone you like Paris Hilton, you’ll say it with just enough coyness that your interlocutor will understand that you shouldn’t be mistaken for that kind of person.

A guilty displeasure is the same thing, in reverse. It’s something you genuinely don’t like much, but feel like you should, because the kind of person you are, or aspire to be, must like that thing.

For example, some of my own guilty displeasures are opera, old movies, and poetry. I don’t hate any of those, but I like them far less than I want to admit when I’m not writing a blog post about guilty displeasures. I have been to operas, including the full cycle of Wagner’s Nibelungen. I have friends who have made me watch black and white movies from the Hollywood golden age. I used to write poems as a teenager, like all sensitive and nerdy young men. But quite frankly, I don’t feel that I need any of those things in my life. When my friend who conducts operas at the university invites me to one, I patiently wait for the singers to quit singing so I can properly enjoy the instrumental parts of the music. When I must watch old movies, I spend 25% of the time reading the Wikipedia summary to keep myself entertained. When I read a book or blog post that quotes something in verse, I literally just skip it and hope it wasn’t important to understand the rest.

I have those guilty displeasures because I’m a snob. I like what we might call “high culture.” I enjoy classical music and theater,¹ artsy (recent) movies and classic literature (in prose). So it seems ill-fitting that I would dislike some “high culture” art forms.

(Conversely, I don’t care much about pop culture, so my total lack of interest for mainstream global anglo pop music isn’t a guilty displeasure at all. It just isn’t part of me.)

Of course, your guilty displeasures might be totally different. They often arise from your particular social environment, or the milieu you grew up in. If your family likes to watch sports and you don’t, you might feel something’s wrong with you. You might feel bad about not enjoying your spouse’s favorite hobby. The guilt related to my distaste of opera has increased after I became the close friend of someone who conducts them, considers Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte to be one of the greatest works of art ever, and even thought of naming his daughter Fiordiligi until this was vetoed by his wife and all his other friends.

Another common way to get guilty displeasures is related to work. When you choose a career and invest several years developing it, it can become difficult to accept that you genuinely don’t like some core parts of it — or perhaps, in extreme cases, all of it. In those extreme cases, you’ll probably switch paths sooner or later, but in other cases I suspect that it’s fairly common to bear the sunk cost for all of your active life and feel relieved from the guilty displeasure only at the time of retirement. Which is rather tragic.

I’m pretty happy with where my career is at now, but for a long time a big guilty displeasure I had was math. I’m a smart guy; I’ve studied the sciences and used to really like physics; I enjoy puzzles and intellectually stimulating exercises; I work in software and artificial intelligence. It seems like someone like me should like math. I’m not even bad at it! But it bores me to death. If I liked math, I think I could have made more money or had more impact in the technical fields I picked for myself. I could have enjoyed biology research and its heavy reliance on statistics. I could have had a lot of fun doing linear algebra and become a star AI researcher or something. But no, I’m stuck working in software, constantly hoping that I won’t ever need to multiply matrices or interpret a p-value.

And relatedly, in recent years I started developing a guilty displeasure for coding. But fortunately we have AI coding agents now so that problem seems permanently solved.

Over time, I think most people get more comfortable with who they are, and both guilty pleasures and displeasures fade away.

A younger version of myself felt guilty at disliking reading scientific papers. Then I realized I just didn’t want to be a scientist, and stopped caring. (Also, I realized that nobody really enjoys it, so it’s kind of a moot point; when I realized this I tried to solve the problem for everybody, and now work for a startup that is making real progress against this problem.)

Another younger version of myself felt guilty about not enjoying hiking and nature. In the kind of educated social class I’m in, this is a very common one! Liking nature is a strong enough social norm. On a date, once, I asked the person if he liked nature, and he was visibly and uncharacteristically uncertain as to how to respond, until I said I didn’t care much for it and he admitted, with relief, that he didn’t like it much either. Now this isn’t a guilty displeasure at all and I fully own the fact that I can go years without a hike. I’ve integrated it as part of my self-image.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying to cultivate a guilty displeasure as part of your identity. It’s probably better to focus on positive rather than negative things, though I allow an exception for things that are overabundant and not that good for you, for which snobbery is a totally valid defensive strategy. Similarly, some guilty pleasures are probably better kept a little guilty, if they clash with who you aspire to be. But in general, it’s better to be a confident, self-loving person, and identifying guilty displeasures, so that you can decide what to do with them, seems like a good first step.

So, what are your guilty displeasures?

Mosaic of the Muses, from Portugal (4th century)

1. Why do I not like opera, then? I think it’s the singing, but it’s kind of complicated. Across all genres, I usually prefer instrumental music to song. When I was a kid, I also didn’t like musical movies, since I felt the music got in the way of telling the story. I’ve come around and enjoy musicals now, and furthermore I enjoy singing enough that I sing in a choir and like choral music, but I never developed a taste for lyrical singing, which is central to opera.