Can’t Find Happiness? Settle for Joy
Some people are giving up on happiness. Instead, they are taking a sharp semantic turn toward joy.
“We are right to desire happiness; it’s just that the predatory process of chasing it drives what we apparently want out of reach,” Jonathan Rowson, a chess grandmaster, wrote in The Times.
Mr. Rowson said his realization that happiness is not the most important thing in life was a relief. Many people do not even want to be happy, he added, but they are not sure what it is they really want.
“My best guess — and I can only guess — is that we are seeking joy,” he wrote. “Joy is mysterious because we desire it as pleasure but cannot find it without pain.”
If joy is preferable to happiness — and that depends on how a person defines those words — it is a good time to find it.
“Joy, it seems, is everywhere these days,” Laura M. Holson wrote in The Times.
One of the reasons for its ubiquity, said Ingrid Fetell Lee, the author of a book on finding joy in ordinary things, is that defining happiness is difficult. She told Ms. Holson that the great thing about joy is that you do not need to be happy to feel it. And it is easy to find. Walking outdoors or tossing confetti can bring joy.
“I don’t have to worry about making everything awesome in my life,” Ms. Fetell Lee said.
Too much joy has a downside, though. Michelle Shiota, an associate professor of social psychology at Arizona State University, told The Times that seeking joy in every moment to mask sadness or anger carries risks.
“What people call negative emotions are a symptom that something is wrong and we have to change,” Dr. Shiota said. “We learn from them.”
Joy does not always mean a state of high arousal, she added. It can be found in a quiet room. In fact, being highly aroused all the time interferes with joy.
In Silicon Valley, there is so much stimulation that provokes joy that some people are experimenting with “dopamine fasts.”
The three founders of SleepWell, a sleep analysis start-up, are depriving themselves of pretty much everything during these fasts: eating, music, touching, eye contact, talking, looking at screens, and work.
“We’re addicted to dopamine,” James Sinka, the most enthusiastic of the three founders about the fasting, told The Times. “And because we’re getting so much of it all the time, we end up just wanting more and more, so activities that used to be pleasurable now aren’t. Frequent stimulation of dopamine gets the brain’s baseline higher.”
Nellie Bowles wrote in The Times that people on dopamine fasts “are moving toward two very old groups: those in silent meditation and the Amish.”
So, once again, what was old is made new again.
Sharon Salzberg, who teaches Buddhist meditation, said that when her book “Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness” came out, she had to defend happiness against people determined to rebrand it.
“A number of people have been saying, ‘Why don’t you say ‘joy’?” Ms. Salzberg told The Times, adding that they misunderstand happiness as merely pursuing pleasure. According to the Dalai Lama, true happiness is found in heart and mind, and does not rely on physical pleasure, which is fleeting.
“I like redeeming the idea and meaning around happiness, to have more clarity and deep understanding. So people know what happiness actually is.” ROBB TODD
Learning that not everything in life needs to be awesome.