What We Value Tells Something About Us And What We Are Missing
The wider my range of experience gets, the more clearly I can judge what's actually happening around me. There was a time when I simply dismissed whatever didn't appeal to me. English literature, hunting, opera, bluegrass, the abstract canvases of a few famous painters, all of it went straight into my mental reject pile. These days I understand that people are built with different abilities and tastes, and that difference explains a lot.
Consider eyesight. Someone who sees better than the person next to them has a real edge if they're trying to hit a pitch in the major leagues. Musical taste works the same way, splitting along lines that have nothing to do with quality. People tend to label the music they dislike as noise and leave it at that. What caught me off guard once was watching the hostess of a polka program (and if the word means nothing to you, go look it up) sing, dance, and handle several instruments, while the couples out on the floor were plainly having the time of their lives.
Part of this comes down to the senses themselves. One person's perception makes a given activity a pleasure that leaves someone else cold. Background matters too. People raised in a certain setting pick up an appreciation for things that outsiders never learned to value. And we absorb the likes and dislikes of whoever we spend time with, often without noticing.
So why the impulse to run down whatever we don't happen to enjoy? Nobody in this society is holding a gun to your head, insisting you love sports or some particular stripe of music, literature, or art. When a person hands out uninformed verdicts about things they haven't bothered to understand, I wonder whether it points to shaky self-confidence. Are there people who only feel secure when their own preference gets treated as the single acceptable one? Being the odd one out in a crowd is genuinely hard, standing among people you share nothing with while they buzz about something that leaves you blank. Imagine getting dragged to a tailgate party for a college you never set foot in, and missing the symphony that same evening, with excellent reserved seats going empty for every performance.
Try poking around in unfamiliar territory and holding off on the verdict. Count me among the admirers of hunting, though I don't do it myself, because bringing down game takes skill and a surprising mix of talents. A lot of this falls along male and female lines. Men probably scratch their heads over why a wedding warrants such an enormous fuss, and women probably wonder why men pour so many hours and dollars into team sports and hunting. Where I live the thing is coon hunting, and the hunters, mostly men, will stay out the whole night when they're at it. Throwing a wedding draws on organizational skill and an artistic eye; the hunt draws on reading how the animal behaves, knowing the land, keeping a good dog if the job calls for one, and the plain stamina to go without sleep.
Nearly anyone who throws themselves into an activity carries knowledge and abilities you've never stopped to consider. I know for certain that high-frequency sounds slip right past me, the ones that grate on more sensitive ears, and they don't bother me in the slightest. My sense of smell runs dull too, which spared me the misery a lot of women face in pregnancy, where catching a whiff of food is enough to send them running for the bathroom.