Fervently Pursuing Joy
There are moments when we feel present, alive, and glimpse into what makes life worth living. It allows our true essence to surface, something we may have neglected in the wake of so many external and internal distractions. Taking a step back to excavate our innate sense of joy is a worthwhile pursuit. To paraphrase many that have gone before us, it is the small things that make life great.
According to the French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, “Unhappiness is unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.” Sisyphus, the king of Ephyra, was renowned in Greek mythology for his ingenuity; indeed, he was so clever that he cheated death twice, angering those that reigned over him. They took their revenge by condemning Sisyphus to eternal torment in the underworld: He had to roll a huge boulder up a hill. When he reached the top, the stone would roll back down to the bottom, and he would have to start all over, on and on, forever.
Nowadays, any task combining boredom, struggle, stress, and futility might be labeled “Sisyphean.” Think of so-called duct-tapers in customer service, who are tasked to deal with angry people all day, while the conditions that create those aggressive customers never change. Many could even argue that all of life is Sisyphean: We eat to just get hungry again, and shower just to get dirty again, day after day, until the end.
Often in many intersections of life’s domains, happiness has been evangelized as a moral obligation and a necessary pursuit through hard work. That is, if you work hard, then you will become successful. If you just get that preliminary raise, stand on that mountain of good grades, lose those initial five pounds, then happiness will ensue. Success is sought after first, and happiness second.
Recent research from the University of Warwick indicates that happiness and satisfaction in workers within the marketplace will lead to dynamic productivity. Managerial leaders that make their workplace happy for their staff within their organizational structure highlight the threaded association of an increase of emotional health in the work environment. In contrast, the yearly Gallup reporting indicates that employees find that they do not have high levels of engagement, passion, motivation, and meaning attached to their work. This typically costs the United States an annual $350 billion due to the weight of unhappy and disengaged workers in the marketplace. Within the contemporary workforce, companies and executives are using various perks as cash incentives, juice bars, vacation packages, and anonymous surveys to establish a sense of employee satisfaction and better navigate their employees’ doldrums.
Clearly, happiness and optimism continually fuel the trajectory of individuals’ success platforms and give them the competitive edge to embrace a greater performance standard and higher achievement in the workplace. The current ground-breaking research from Positive Psychology is evident that cultivating a positive brain ensures a more motivated, creative, resilient, efficient, and productive lifestyle outcome that drives workplace productivity upward. This particular discovery has been confirmed with thousands of other studies.
Barbara Fredrickson introduced this novel concept in 1998, the same time frame that Martin Seligman, the former president of the American Psychological Association, became responsible for pioneering efforts with steering attention and funding into the field of Positive Psychology. Using Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory, she cites that the point of positive emotions is that, “… these positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire: joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, contentment sparks the urge to savour and integrate, and love sparks a recurring cycle of each of these urges within safe, close relationships.” Positive emotions open our minds while facilitating and building our inner resources as abilities, skills, knowledge gains, and relationships.
Researcher Courtney Ackerman highlights this list of positive emotions as an invitation to better describe constructive mood states and create a foundation for how to narrate our common experience in the workplace and beyond:
Joy – a sense of elation, happiness, and perhaps even exhilaration, often experienced as a sudden spike due to something good happening.
Gratitude – a feeling of thankfulness, for something specific or simply all-encompassing, often accompanied by humility and even reverence.
Serenity – a calm and peaceful feeling of acceptance of oneself.
Interest – a feeling of curiosity or fascination that demands and captures your attention.
Hope – a feeling of optimism and anticipation about a positive future.
Pride – a sense of approval of oneself and pleasure in an achievement, skill, or personal attribute.
Amusement – a feeling of lighthearted pleasure and enjoyment, often accompanied by smiles and easy laughter.
Inspiration – feeling engaged, uplifted, and motivated by something you witnessed.
Awe – an emotion that is evoked when you witness something grand, spectacular, or breathtaking, sparking a sense of overwhelming appreciation.
Elevation – the feeling you get when you see someone engaging in an act of kindness, generosity, or inner goodness, spurring you to aspire to similar action.
Altruism – usually referred to as an act of selflessness and generosity towards others, but can also describe the feeling you get from helping others.
Satisfaction – a sense of pleasure and contentment you get from accomplishing something or fulfilling a need.
Relief – the feeling of happiness you experience when an uncertain situation turns out for the best, or a negative outcome is avoided.
Affection – an emotional attachment to someone or something, accompanied by a liking for them and a sense of pleasure in their company.
Cheerfulness – a feeling of brightness, being upbeat and noticeably happy or chipper; feeling like everything is going your way.
Surprise (the good kind!) – a sense of delight when someone brings you unexpected happiness or a situation goes even better than you had hoped.
Confidence – emotion involving a strong sense of self-esteem and belief in yourself; can be specific to a situation or activity, or more universal.
Admiration – a feeling of warm approval, respect, and appreciation for someone or something.
Enthusiasm – a sense of excitement, accompanied by motivation and engagement.
Eagerness – like a less intense form of enthusiasm; a feeling of readiness and excitement for something.
Euphoria – intense and the all-encompassing sense of joy or happiness, often experienced when something extremely positive and exciting happens.
Contentment – peaceful, comforting, and low-key sense of happiness and well-being.
Enjoyment – a feeling of taking pleasure in what is going on around you, especially in situations like a leisure activity or social gathering.
Optimism – positive and hopeful emotion that encourages you to look forward to a bright future, one in which you believe that things will mostly work out.
Happiness – a feeling of pleasure and contentment in the way things are going; a general sense of enjoyment of and enthusiasm for life.
Love – perhaps the strongest of all positive emotions, love is a feeling of deep and enduring affection for someone, along with a willingness to put their needs ahead of your own; it can be directed towards an individual, a group of people, or even all humanity.
For the past three decades, happiness has become a very hot topic since science has merged with one of the oldest philosophical questions of “What is the very nature of happiness?” Not just in the realm of inquiry for philosophers and poets to describe, the study of happiness has exploded globally with bright intensity.
Psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have all joined in a collaborative effort to better explore their intersecting interest in these disciplines. Psychologists desire to know and understand what people feel, economists desire to grasp what people value, and neuroscientists want to better explain how people’s brains maintain a response mechanism to different rewards. These three disciplines that have been interested in the same topic have placed happiness on the global map as Nobel Prizes are awarded, Science research papers and journal articles are written, and federal governments all throughout the world are keenly interested in cultivating happiness in people.
In light of this, people use real-time experiences to subjectively respond to the question of, “How are you?” to describe their emotions every day. According to the latest findings in both the field and lab studies, very few experiences linger and make an impact longer than three months for most people. Typically when good things happen, people will celebrate the events and eventually become sober after a while. When bad things occur, they might whine, moan, and complain for a while before picking themselves back up and moving on.
Many psychologists now agree that people are starting to make the best of what they have been given and realize their own sense of resilience when their emotions are not working for them altogether whether in their workplace, family, or communal life. History has many examples of how people are redefining their sense of happiness in their various life spheres.
People continue to synthesize their experiences of happiness and identify their own silver linings in the midst of aversively negative, traumatic, or tragedy-like circumstances. Moreese Bickham, who spent over 37 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary stated, “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.” Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Jim Wright resigned after a blacklisted book deal. A few years afterward, he reflected to the New York Times that he was, “so much better off, physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, and in almost every other way.” Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles, had been replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962 prior to the band’s global success platform and later reflected, “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles” as a session drummer. In many ways, the psychological community is noting how people are happiest when appropriately challenged but wither when they are threatened, and people work better when rewarded rather than punished.
Rehearse positive reframing.
When you feel existential dissatisfaction—that sense that everything is meaningless—giving up can feel like the easiest course of action. Positive reframing can really kick in as you take advantage of the process. You will not necessarily change what occurs in the world; yet, you most certainly can change your response to that perception. Meet that feeling of despair with a personal motto, such as “I don’t know what everything means, but I do know I am here right now, and I will not squander this moment.” Say it out loud so you can comprehend it fully and consciously.
Look to do a little good.
One of the best ways to cultivate futility is by focusing on the big things you can’t control—war, natural disasters, systemic injustices —as opposed to the little things you can. Those little things include bringing a small blessing or source of relief to others. For example, if your commute to school is a soul-inhibiting existential nightmare, don’t just ruminate on the cars stopped ahead of you. Rather, focus on making space for that poor driver stuck in the wrong lane who’s desperately trying to merge. If you’re sitting in your classroom wondering whether anyone would notice if you stopped being a student, bring the peer a fresh cup of Joe (i.e. coffee), and enjoy the small delight that small kindness brings both of you.
Be fully present.
Absurdity tends to sting only when we see it from the “outside.” For example, when you think about how meaningless it has been to wash the dishes every day in the past only to find them dirty again right now—and imagine the countless dish washings that the rest of your life will comprise. Confronting the absurd is much more comfortable when you do so with mindfulness. This is the point that the Vietnamese monastic Thich Nhat Hanh made when he wrote, “While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.” When the broad sweep of life brings you discontent, concentrate on this moment, and savor it. The pleasure and meaning you can find right now are real; the meaninglessness of the future is not.
Sum the total of the small.
Dr. Ed Diener from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cites in his research that the frequency of happy experiences can be a much better predictor for sustaining joy rather than the intensity of positive experiences. Going on an outing with a celebrity, winning the Nobel Prize, or buying a mansion are positive life events that have much emotional intensity. Yet, having a dozen mildly nice things occur each day, such as receiving a kiss from family, wearing your favorite shoes, and meeting friends for dinner accumulate the same positive feelings. In this sense, happiness is the sum total of all the small things that occur in each day.
Experiencing happiness will not just remain an outlier in the daily vernacular if Americans position themselves to pursue emotional intelligence. This will require vision to establish meaning in our work, satisfying relationships, and a sense of enduring hope. Achieving happiness is similar to the concept of losing weight: going on a diet and exercising more regularly with consistency are the key cornerstones of weight loss. Over time, the results will come.
Proactive behaviors such as meditating, exercising, getting enough sleep, practicing altruism, and maintaining social connections are all important elements in developing lifestyle habits of happiness that can tremendously impact your daily experiences. Fervently pursuing joy involves leaning into what the day brings, laughing, grabbing your boulder, and setting out to the nearest hill.
