In Defense of Joy
Normally, I wouldn’t think that defending joy would be a necessary exercise. But it seems like everywhere I look, whether it’s online or…online, I guess, because that’s where we live now, the most prominent and richly rewarded articles or posts are dark, bitter, and cynical—you know, the opposite of joyful.
And it’s a struggle to not get pulled into that vortex. After all, life right now is weird and painful, and every day seems to bring a fresh blizzard of tragic news. Perhaps cynicism, then, makes sense?
Well, no, just the opposite. Because feeling bad is not a prerequisite for doing good. And I’d go even further than that: being perpetually mired in bitter cynicism and its vicissitudes–dejection, antipathy, burnout, and rage—is an actual impediment to creating positive change, because what’s the point of doing anything if it’s truly all so hopeless?
And, further still, that feeling joyful—with its accompanying warmth, energy, and optimism—is the actual state of mind that inspires people to take meaningful and sustained action.
More fundamentally though, what I’m talking about is love.
Uh-oh.
Isolated and Overconfident
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of writing I want to be sharing and, perhaps more importantly, the kind of writing I want to spend my time doing.
Several times over the past few months I’ve begun but quickly stopped working on articles because the subject matter and its related context would’ve required me to step into the ephemeral cultural beefs and tit-for-tat online feuds that make me feel so hopeless.
Tangentially related, it has also recently occurred to me that I’m only having regular conversations with a few people, all of whom I know very well. This is largely a symptom of the pandemic, but if you think about it, it’s also something that should probably disqualify me from commenting on “society” as a whole—because I’m not really integrated with it in a meaningful way.
Before the pandemic, I’d regularly go to cultural events like literary readings and art openings, as well as weekly “classes” (for lack of a better word) at a (Western) Buddhist temple. I’d go to yoga studios, hang out at coffee shops, eat inside of restaurants, and spend hours at a bouldering gym being actively terrible at bouldering. I also used to go into an office, which has since closed down for good but in my mind is still somehow arranged exactly as it was the week we abruptly left it in March of 2020.
The only casual interactions I have with strangers now happen mainly at a fitness center, where most people, including myself, have headphones on, stare at their phones 90% of the time, and aren’t exactly thrilled there’s other people in the room with them. I will occasionally go to a restaurant, provided I can sit outside with plenty of space around me, and I go to the grocery store every week, but that hardly counts.
My point here is that my daily life, both online and elsewhere, has become nearly devoid of interaction with anyone I don’t actively choose to interact with. This nearly eliminates chance encounters, idle chit-chat with strangers, overheard but interesting bits of dialogue in elevators or hallways or on the bus or in the office or at lunch spots or in coffee shops.
What comes to mind for me is those pachinko machines they have in Japan, where a metal ball bounces against random pegs, knocking unpredictably around on its way down. An apt metaphor for life in normal times—only now it’s as though I’ve removed as many of the pegs as I possibly can in an attempt to make my days as swift, continuous, and agreeable as I can make it.
If that doesn’t sound half bad, that’s because we really, really, really like it when people agree with us and our version of reality, and we’d be quite pleased if everyone just stopped exerting their own free will and simply did the things we want them to do, dammit.
Obviously, that’s not how the world works.
What I’m saying here is that my intuitive sense of what’s going on in the world is now based largely on inputs I receive in my bedroom, where I sit reading and reacting to books, articles, and posts by people I don’t know and will never have an actual conversation with. And I’d be willing to bet my situation is quite similar to so many of the influential cynics out there hard at work tweet-dunking on defenseless screenshots, pumping out cynical diatribes that straw man oppositional viewpoints, and otherwise channeling their inner rage into public forums.
As should be clear, it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to understand and explain contemporary cultural movements while staring at a laptop screen in my bedroom. Thinking about this has forced me to reconsider the type of media I consume, how that’s affecting my outlook on the world, and how the type of media being created and spread is affecting the actual world.
Anger Makes Angry
Strange as it may sound, prominent physicists have long believed that we live in a participatory universe. Translated into everyday life, this simply means that how we choose to show up in the world each day changes how the world appears to us.
If I’m feeling calm, grounded, and kind, it’s not like the world falls at my feet or anything, but it does appear to me more manageable, less threatening, less chaotic. And when challenges do arise (as they inevitably will) my response to them is more measured and therefore ultimately more competent.
If I leave my house in a calm state, for example, and discover that my car’s been broken into, which would totally suck, I’d be far more likely in a calm headspace to simply do what needed to be done about it, rather than lose my shit and burn up a ton of useless energy ranting and raving about it.
On the flip side, if I was up all night drinking red bull and mainlining rage-inducing content, say, then spent all morning embedded in more rage-inducing content while simultaneously rage tweeting about said content, and then I walk outside and discover that my car’s been broken into, I’m far more likely at that point to have an emotional meltdown and go off on anyone I might encounter the rest of the day, be they at the coffee shop, in traffic, at work, at home, or online. My rage would feel good and justified even, as I’ve spent all morning storing up an abundance of rage fuel that met the spark of a real-life grievance, though the release of it would be wildly misdirected.
Here’s an experiment you’re welcome to try for yourself: tomorrow, smile and make eye contact with everyone you come near and watch what happens. The next day, sneer at everyone instead. Compare and contrast the difference.
How about a real-world example?
Okay.
My first job after college was at a brewpub in Columbus, Ohio, where I worked as a waiter. This was nothing new to me, as I’d worked in food service since landing my first job at 15 as the world’s worst cashier (WWC™) at McDonald’s.
Only now, you see, things were different. I had a college degree from a liberal arts school. I read high-minded Po-e-try and Lit-er-a-ture. I thought deeply about “stuff,” like, um, “important stuff.” I was sure I was on my way to doing many great and impressive things in the world (narrator: He wasn’t).
I met another recent college grad at the brewpub, also a waiter, with a similar disposition. We became fast friends and would spend our time mercilessly ripping on the working-class folks who showed up every day to eat barbeque, drink beer, and pay our rent via tips. We looked down our noses at them, plain and simple, because we felt we were on our way to doing many great and impressive things in the world (narrator: They weren’t).
A couple years after leaving town I remember having a long conversation with that friend, who was still working at the restaurant, and he reported a remarkable development. He’d been reading this incredible book and, get this, it was recommended to him by one of the regulars we’d previously pegged as an absolute dullard. As it turns out, this guy had a ton of interesting things to say, read great books, and was actually pretty damn smart.
“It’s amazing the things people have to say when you stop sneering at them,” my friend said.
In all honesty, I was shocked.
Now, this is painful to write, as it should be painfully obvious that people react to you based on how you react to them. But it really wasn’t obvious to me because I was young, self-centered, arrogant, and wrapped up in a reality that simply wasn’t real. It looked real, it felt real, but it was nothing but a projection of my own delusions.
I mean, nothing too profound here, that’s just how reality works. Who we are and the things we believe are largely delusional, and are also what we see when we “look at” reality, or what we perceive as reality. This is not to say there isn’t an objective reality out there beyond our perceptions (or is there?), it’s just that we don’t have access to it—or at least not direct access, as by necessity we must filter it through our individual delusions in a desperate attempt to make sense of it.
And of course, our reality-creating skills are developed and most strongly reinforced by our environment—meaning the people we talk to and associate with, the things we read and watch, and what we observe in our immediate vicinity.
For example, if from a young age everywhere I went people kept telling me that dogs are nothing but flea-ridden good-for-nothings that should be left outside and harshly punished if disobedient, I’d be very likely to believe it. I’d also be very likely to say that same thing to anyone foolish enough to come to me looking for guidance about dogs. And I sure as shit wouldn’t let some stranger walk into my life and tell me otherwise.
This is how we create and reinforce our bubble. And the harder we work to protect that bubble, by keeping disagreeable people and their disagreeable opinions the hell away from it, the more fragile and more delusional it becomes.
It’s only when that bubble pops that we’re able to let go of wrong thinking, bad ideas, and stuffy prejudices. This could happen when, to go back to the previous example, an injured and adorable beagle puppy, say, won’t leave my porch no matter how much I yell and threaten it. Eventually, after a day or two, I might begrudgingly give it water, then scraps of food, then after 68 hours of the pup sleeping out in the sleet and rain but refusing to leave no matter how many times I yell “SCRAM,” something in my heart just melts and I can’t help but bring it inside. I name it Scrammy, and before long it’s sleeping in my bed and I love it to pieces and can’t imagine living without it.
At that point, my reality has changed. My perception of dogs as good-for-nothing flea bags, despite being aligned with the universal beliefs surrounding me, was simply wrong. A correction is in order.
Once the bubble bursts we can then work on creating a new, more refined, and hopefully more accurate approximation of reality. This one will also be just an approximation of reality-as-it-really-is, but it benefits greatly from the fact that we’ve sloughed off views we now recognize as false.
*Said while dusting off hands*
Now that we’ve nailed down how reality works let’s get back to joy.
I haven’t thought about joy in a long time, but the more I think about it, the more important it feels. We need to feel joy in our lives, and I don’t mean we need to feel pleasure, or thrills, or whatever minor lift we might get from a new shirt.
I’m talking about joy as in love. Not romantic love, of course. I’m talking about love that is more along the lines of the Christian concept of agape, or the Buddhist concept of universal compassion. (I know other religions have similar concepts, but I’m ignorant so unfortunately can’t point them out.)
Now, we’ve stumbled onto a pretty big-deal concept here and I can’t really do it justice, so please consider this just me pointing (in a flailing, pitiable manner) towards an idea with the hope that you can take it further.
What I’m talking about here (apparently) is joy as a spiritual experience, though not (necessarily) a religious one. And the only way to access this type of joy, as far as I can tell, is by cultivating a universal love and compassion for all of humankind, perhaps even all creatures.
Well, shoot.
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
“Hit the bricks, hippie, ain’t no way I’m CuLtiVatInG lOvE for that idiot over there.”
Fair enough, that’s totally up to you. But for the record, there’s a very good chance that idiot over there thinks of YOU as that idiot over there. And, also for the record, there is a non-trivial chance you are BOTH deeply wrong about at least something the each of you hold quite dear to your hearts. And furthermore, the both of you probably agree about something neither of you would ever in a million years give the other credit for believing.
Look, being wrong is part of life. I mean, I’m wrong constantly. If I look back a year, maybe two, it’s very easy to see how things that I felt were 100% Ironclad Guaranteed True®, were not, in fact, true. Now that I think about it, this just literally happened in a big way to me last month.
Point being: we’re all flawed and subject to our own limits, we’re all biased in key ways we don’t really understand, and the reality we each observe individually is far more the projection of our own thoughts, environment, and the prejudices we unconsciously hold than any kind of objective truth.
Now, what I’ve found most challenging when dealing with accommodating, let alone loving, someone we disagree with, is that our first impulse is to discredit the very idea by locking obsessively onto our worst-case scenario enemy, instead of just someone we kind of don’t get along with at work, like Jim or Alex, both of whom never shut up and are a constant pain in the ass in meetings.
But, instead, the typical reply is something like: What about white supremacists, huh pal? And Nazis?? You saying we should love Nazis???
Look, you and I are not now—nor will we ever—be equipped to find compassion and love for the cruelest among us. Leave that to the saints.
But let me step out of the way for a moment and introduce Viktor E. Frankl, a man who spent three years in four different concentration camps during WWII, lost his entire family during that time to starvation, pestilence, and gas chambers, lived to see the other side, and then almost immediately upon liberation wrote this:
“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Of course, there’s also this incredible quote from Martin Luther King, Jr, taken from a speech he gave in 1967:
“And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.”
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now what?
Well, it’s not as though you’ll read either of these and suddenly become kinder and more willing to hug your enemies. I just think it cracks a door open, by ~1mm, that leads to a very long hallway that leads to an enormous empty room with a steep, spiral staircase that leads to a dusty attic that opens (with a lot of elbow grease) onto a veranda that has a view (if you look really hard through a telescope) on the possibility of loving and forgiving the people we dislike and blame for everything that’s wrong with the world.
That might still be near-impossible for most of us, but without at least a basic understanding that this is even a possibility, what are we left with? Only bitterness. And a belief that “bad people” are making us unhappy and miserable by preventing all the good things (meaning things we want) from appearing in the world.
This is, by the way, the basis for all conspiracy thinking—and, well, genocide, like the kind mentioned above. Because if all good things don’t or can’t exist because X group of people exist, then life pretty quickly turns into a math problem with a frighteningly simple solve.
Thankfully, it’s not true, even when it feels like it is, which is all the time, especially in an era like ours where the surest way to score online points is by pointing out how different we are. The thing is, we’re all far more alike than we are different.
I know it’s hard to cope with such good news. Let me get back to joy.
When we can feel in our bones that there’s another person who’s just like us within every person out there—meaning a flawed human being who is trying hard to understand a very confusing world while also dealing with things like covering the rent, getting the kids to school, working the job that’s killing them, dealing with the effects of whatever coping mechanism they use to blunt the pain of that job, and frowning into the mirror thinking maybe this is the year they lose that gut—it then becomes possible to forgive their idiotic opinions, and maybe, just maybe, even cultivate the tiniest smidgen of love and compassion for them.
Why is this important?
From compassion and love spring joy, and it’s this feeling of joy that provides the energy we need to discover and destroy the things in the world that are turning people just like us into blind idiots.
This might mean, for example, advocating for a fair economy and higher wages, or better public education and universal healthcare, or stronger antitrust enforcement of the tech companies making lunatic-level monopoly profits (the top tech companies have individual market valuations higher than most country’s GDPs) off the algorithms they’ve designed to capture us in a state of rage and finger pointing (and clicking and content creating).
Also, just to be clear, a love for others is not the same thing as condoning or accepting the things they believe. It’s just an awareness of where those beliefs are coming from and how easy it really is to fall into the trap of believing them. It doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and say, “Welp nothing to be done here!” Just the opposite. Once we can properly identify where the beliefs are coming from, we can then better understand how to respond.
What I’m taking absolutely forever to say here is that it’s okay to cultivate positive emotional states like joy, and to feel compassion and love for people, even while there’s injustice happening in the world.
I’ll repeat what I said at the beginning of this piece, that feeling bad is not a prerequisite for doing good. Let me say it another way: Feeling good doesn’t impede your ability to do good.
If we wait to feel good until the world is sorted out exactly how we’d like it to be, well, we’re going to be waiting a very long time.
Alright, I’m in deep waters here and could use an assist. So let me finish with a quote from the recently passed, beloved Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh:
“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change”
—Thich Nhat Hanh