How to Appreciate
How to Appreciate
August 2026
(After Paul Graham's How<br>to Disagree, applied to the actualist gradient from resentment to<br>appreciation.)
Every moment of being alive makes the same offer: you are here. And<br>every moment, one answers it—with a mood, a grievance, a shrug, a<br>pleasure. Most people answer thousands of times a day without noticing they<br>are answering at all. Actualism's<br>central question—"How am I<br>experiencing this moment of being alive?"—is nothing but the<br>question that surfaces the current answer.
Graham's point about disagreement was that "be civil" is a rule about tone<br>that never touches structure, so he named the structural forms instead. The<br>same applies here: "be positive" touches nothing. What helps is names for the<br>forms an answer to the moment can take. So here is an attempt at a<br>hierarchy—the Resentment-to-Appreciation scale, RA0 at the bottom.
RA0. The Basic Grievance.
The lowest form is to denounce existence itself. "I didn't ask to be<br>born!" "Life's a sick joke." "Life's a bitch with death at the end." This is<br>the name-calling of being alive: it says nothing about this moment, because<br>it applies with equal force to every moment—which is how you can tell<br>it isn't about any of them. Richard, the founder of actualism, calls it the<br>basic<br>resentment: the flat objection to being here that feeds anger and malice<br>outward as much as sorrow inward.
Like name-calling, it has an educated register that fools people into<br>ranking it higher. "Existence is absurd; consciousness is an evolutionary<br>accident condemned to suffer" is "u r a fag" with a bibliography. The level<br>is set by the structure—a verdict against being-here as such—not<br>by the vocabulary.
RA1. The Grievance.
One rung up: attack the circumstances instead of the moment. Born in the<br>wrong place, dealt a bad hand, the game is rigged, years of effort with<br>nothing to show. This outranks the basic grievance because it engages<br>particulars, and the particulars may even be true—just as an ad hominem<br>may truly describe the speaker and still not touch the argument. Facts about<br>one's circumstances do not touch the moment. Each grievance decomposes into a<br>fact, which can stand as plain data, and a grievance-add—"…and<br>this is unjust, and I'm owed"—which is the part doing the<br>resenting.
The test mirrors Graham's: even if the hand is exactly as bad as claimed,<br>what does that change about what is actually here now? The coffee does not<br>taste of the rigging.
RA2. Responding to Mood.
Next up: objecting to the coloration in which the moment arrives rather<br>than to the moment. "Today feels grey." "I woke up flat, so the day is<br>nothing." Mood is the tone of the moment—the least substantive<br>thing about it, and a notoriously fickle witness: the same walk, the same<br>cup, will read differently within the hour. The first half-hour after waking<br>is this level's chief habitat—the standing background-grumble arrives<br>before any content has, and gets read as a verdict on the day. Whether the<br>moment reached you flat matters much less than what the moment actually<br>contains.
RA3. Resignation.
The first form that addresses the moment itself—but only to state,<br>without evidence or delight, the bare opposite of the grievance. "It is what<br>it is." "Could be worse." "Mustn't grumble." These are what Richard calls the<br>grey-coloured glasses: cynical, world-weary, resigned. Stoicism is resignation with better branding.
Resignation looks like progress because it produces quiet. But it<br>concedes the vale-of-tears premise and merely agrees to stop litigating<br>it—putting up with being here is still a verdict against being<br>here, delivered in a calmer voice. Graham notes that contradiction can<br>sometimes carry an implicit argument; likewise resignation occasionally<br>shelters a near-appreciation ("it is what it is" said with a genuine shrug of<br>release is almost "this is fine"). But mostly it is endurance wearing<br>acceptance's costume.
RA4. Conditional Enjoyment.
Contradiction plus evidence: "Life is good—look: the career, the<br>trip booked for October, the weekend." The first form that can feel<br>convincing. But counterarguments, Graham observes, are often aimed at<br>something slightly different from the original point—and conditional<br>enjoyment is usually aimed at some other moment than this one. What is<br>being enjoyed is the plan, the payoff, the anticipated weekend: content<br>located elsewhere on the timeline, while the moment actually in front of one<br>goes unmet.
And it is conditional in the fatal sense: when the goods wobble, it<br>collapses straight back to RA1, because the grievances were only<br>outbid, never renounced. These are the rose-coloured glasses—the<br>hopeful pair—and per Richard they come off together with the grey.
RA5. Enjoyment.
The first genuinely powerful form, and rarer than it should be for the<br>same reason refutation is: it takes work. To refute you have to quote the<br>actual words; to enjoy at this level you have to quote the<br>moment—engage its actual...