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Our “toxically positive” culture doesn’t allow people to ride the roller coaster of real life, Bowler says, and be honest about its difficulties.
We’ve ended up with a “social fragility” in which being honest often feels like you’re breaking things.
“If you’re at a party, and someone says, ‘How are you?’ and then you sweet dummy, tell them, the second you say it, you can see a look on their face, you immediately start to regret it.”
After her cancer diagnosis in 2015, Bowler found it helpful when people kept it light by saying something that didn’t demand her to “suddenly become a professional updater”.
It was especially meaningful when they started the conversation with a moment of acknowledgement, she says, saying something like, “I’m so sorry, this is happening to you”.
“It was something about the ‘to you’ because when it is you, you can’t believe it. You cannot believe that it will come to your door.”
Bowler says she’s a different person than she was before cancer, and believes the experience carved out a space that she now knows she needs joy to fill.
While happiness feels like luck, she says, joy is a “big, enlivening feeling” that touches our dopamine and reward systems.
“It also engages our stress system, which helps explain why, while we can’t be happy and sad at the same time, we can weirdly be joyful and sad, which I think is a very neat trick.”
Growing up Mennonite, the Christmas gift for everyone in Bowler’s family was the same pair of standard-issue socks.
In being so specific and individual, joy is something like the opposite.
“It’s your one weird delight that lights up just you. For me, it’s absurd because I’m a ridiculous person.”
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) was one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy.
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To make a more joyful life, Bowler recommends three useful pieces of advice by German philosopher Immanuel Kant:
There’s a strange alchemy between joy and service, Bowler says, and also an accidental narcissism to pain.
“When we’re in our own suffering and our own story, we really start to believe that we’re the only one this could possibly happen to … our lives feel very small and sad.
“There’s something about service, when you’re pouring your energy into someone else, it breaks through into someone else’s story and someone else’s life and circumstance. It should be that when we give, we have less, because that’s math. But it somehow creates moreness.”
“There’s this web of love and obligation that we’re all in, which gives us homework, it gives us an assignment. I think we will find more and more joy, the more we’re woven into other people’s lives.”
3. Find something to hope for
“That to me says that joy is an answer to despair. It says, is your life worth not just living, but loving? Joy is asking you to say yes.”
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