Joy - seeking vs choosing
“Joy junkies are not joyful.”
Wait… What?
I first heard that phrase from Dr. Steven C. Hayes who helped develop Acceptance Commitment Therapy…
There’s a wisdom in seeking out joy - finding that which lights up our spirit, makes us content, and live life to the fullest… Many great coaches, teachers, and philosophers talk about pursuing joy as a way to find purpose and deeper meaning in life. After all, the phrase “Follow Your Bliss” resonates with so many people because it was the answer to the common cultural rules of playing it safe, fitting in with the norm, and doing what you’re told - that led many of us to feel trapped in inauthentic lives…
However, there’s an unintentional dark side to pursuing joy:
If we absorb the message that we should be joyful all the time, and if we develop the internal messaging that joy is good but other states are bad, what happens is we don’t just pursue what makes us feel good, but we start to avoid what makes us feel bad. e also avoid what makes us uncomfortable or what takes effort…
Because any growth, any achievement, any forward movement in life requires some discomfort, effort or struggle - if we avoid all of that, our lives get smaller and smaller and we depend on very surface-level “dopamine hits” that only bring us fleeting and ever smaller amounts of joy. The same mechanism is at play for any addiction.
The key is to hold two things as true at once: yes, let’s aim towards the joy in life, but also be present with whatever is currently happening. We need to develop the capacity to hold and the willingness to feel all other emotions: including pain, discomfort, and struggle. This way, the phrase “follow your bliss” gains a different nuance: it’s not that we’re in bliss all the time, but rather we are following and moving in the direction of what that bliss means for us.
Joy in that sense is not something we are lacking and need to satiate - like cravings for food, drugs, alcohol, intimacy, etc.
Joy is rather more like a compass direction that we are choosing to move toward through committed day to day actions.
If we think of joy from this perspective, our creativity will blossom, our fitness and health will improve, and the joy we do experience will be larger and longer lasting.