Recently I got into some debates and done some thinking regarding whether about the difference between what makes some people "click" and why different people like and dislike different things.

At the core of it, all our experiences and feelings are subjective and caused by internal biological and chemical stimuli and reactions. Basically, we "decide" what makes us happy, what makes us sad, what makes us depressed and so on. But we don't make that decision conscientiously, it happens to us, probably based on a lot of factors, such as: what worked before, the mood the person is in that day or moment, the level of tiredness and so on.
And since this is all subjective, we, as an evolved monkey, using our neocortex should be able to rationalize this and realize that if we like a particular instance X (say, painting) and dislike a particular instance Y (say, cat videos), the fact that the former makes us feel happier and the later makes us feel less happy (or even sad/angry, if we talk about gore videos or rape videos etc.). What we should realize is that all of this is just our reaction to something that already happens. The video happens, the situation happens, it's just our interpretation to it that creates our emotional reaction.

And that's my problem with this. Since it's all subjective, why can't we use logic and decide that, if we like X and dislike Y (because we decided so), why can't we just reprogram our brain to like Y and dislike X, or like both of them? Why can't we do this conscientiously ?

My personal anecdote here is that I feel sometimes that I waste time doing activity X (say watch a fashion TV show with no real catch to it) and I'd rather work towards what I like doing, say programming, learning about my personal interests, being in nature, running, climbing etc. And while I can always reframe anything and find something meaningful in it (or in the worst case just ignore the TV show and think about something that I like and work towards that), I still feel I need to be engaged in the TV show, thus gaining close to no new knowledge about any particular interest of mine. So, in the end I feel like crap, feel like I'm not doing anything that I like and if I want to force myself to like this or even find some meaning to it, I feel like I'm denaturing it. So the only thing I can do is: stop and do something I'd rather do OR engage in the activity and hate myself afterwards for wasting that time.

Now, this is a terrible situation, since most of the stuff that happens in daily life is such routine/boring/uninteresting activties, so finding some purpose in them or trying to learn something ouf of them is an useful skill.
But in the end I feel that I must balance this with the list of things I like to do. Even if it's illogical, even if it's just my mind's perception about it. I realized that, I'm a human and I can't answer all the questions. It may not be a question as hard as "what is God?" or "Is this reality an illusion?". It's rather a situation of: I can't, in this limited time and space, technological advancement of the present and current knowledge I own, to find exactly what chemical and biological marker makes me like climbing videos and be indifferent to cat videos. So, instead of trying to understand everything, I need to be more rational about the fights I want to fight. Not everything needs or can be understood to it's essence, since sometimes that requires either an understanding beyond my capabilities (say, the God question), either an understanding that, even if I could understand is beyond my scope of knowledge or technological advancement, so I literally don't have the time required to answer it properly.

I should say that I'm not against analyzing our own thoughts and emotions and trying to understand them. I'm just saying that, upon doing it, we should always take the positive side about what we find. And if we realize that we can't ever answer it fully, or if it opens new questions, that's actually a good thing. We learned something new about ourselves, which, in the end, is the hardest thing to do.

So, my conclusion is that we should try less to find the perfect answers to everything or get sad & depressed that you can't answer some. Not everything has or deserves a perfect answer. Sometimes it's better to just accept that you like doing some things and, if that makes you happy (whatever that means chemically), keep doing it without questioning why it makes you happy. Because, like explaining a joke, nobody likes the process and, in the end, the frog dies.