In The Joy You Make, I highlight the fundamental differences between joy and happiness, broadening our understanding of what joy is and how it manifests in our lives, and my own crab-like path toward joy, especially when life seems, well, awful.

But in every city I speak—Minneapolis; Washington, D.C.; New York City; Raleigh; and Blowing Rock, N.C., to name a few—people ask: “How is it possible to experience joy when… my spouse is dying… I’ve lost my job… Helene destroyed our town… I’m getting divorced… the planet is dying…” 

Let me step back before jumping in. 

I enjoy food metaphors. And one way I’ve detailed the difference between happiness and joy is to ask people to imagine happiness as a Twinkie, that boosts your glucose level and gives you a sugar high (happiness!), followed by a crash. Joy is more like a whole-wheat muffin, metabolized more slowly, without those big highs and lows, leaving you satisfied for a longer time. In short, happiness may be tasty, but joy is more sustaining and gratifying. 

There’s another important difference between joy and happiness. Again, let me turn to a classic American dessert, a fudge brownie. For decades I’ve made Katharine Hepburn’s recipe, reputed by many to be “the best brownie of all time.” 

That is to say that happiness is about “me,” while joy is about “we.”  Connection and gratitude are two necessary ingredients in the best brownie, as they are in joy.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said it best when he wrote in The Book of Joy, “Joy is much bigger than happiness. While happiness is often seen as being dependent on external circumstances, joy is not.” 

So, what provokes joy or allows us to experience it? My fundamental point, based on interviews with sociologists, psychologists, and ethicists, as well as sages and scholars and the experiences of regular people, is that joy lives within us. Robert Emmons, editor in chief of The Journal of Positive Psychology and an expert in joy, wrote that we can cultivate “an attitude of joyfulness, which says that despite what’s happening in my life, I’m going to choose to be joyful.” 

Or, what my T-shirt says even more succinctly: “Choose Joy.”

In other words, joy is always present—on both good days and bad ones—whether in our memories, our relationships, recipes we love, photographs that transport us, and books that connect us….  But it can take some practice to recognize it and then cultivate it.

If you’re at all like I was, you may imagine that joy is expressed in New Year’s Eve celebrations, July Fourth fireworks, weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries. I call this the “big bang” definition of joy; scholars label it “ecstatic” joy. Then they define many other types of joy: religious and spiritual, serene, erotic, vulgar, fearful, even evil joy. You know the word schadenfreude? That’s the pleasure we take in someone else’s misery or misfortune. I think you know that joy, as do I. Adam Potkay, author of The Story of Joy and a professor at The College of William and Mary, describes it perfectly, though not poetically: “Joys are plural and variegated.”

Once we fathom the myriad ways that joy manifests, it’s much easier to recognize and experience on a regular basis. How? 

1. Gratitude is a necessary ingredient of joy, which researchers have shown can be cultivated in as little as three weeks by keeping a “gratitude” journal. Do it daily before bed, instead of making a list of grievances. You’ll start to wake up on the right side of the bed before long.
2. Play has become passe for adults, sadly. And when we do play it’s often a competitive sport, focused on “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” as ABC Wide World of Sports put it. Instead, play a game (board games, cards, tennis, or pickle ball) for the fun of it, for the camaraderie, to unleash your inner kid.
3. Celebrate your imperfection(s). First of all, it takes a lot of effort to live an Instagram-perfect life, and its collateral damage is by now well known. The theory of Wabi-sabi is based on a different notion of beauty; it’s not refined, gorgeous or perfect. A Japanese tea maker, Ryotaro Matsumura, describes Wabi-sabi as “a release from the hostage of perfection,” which allows us to find beauty in unexpected places—nicks, bruises, scars, dents, and peeling. That crack in an exterior wall? Instead of seeing it as a defect, think about how it can let the light in. 

Joy when it hurts

Now that I’ve laid the groundwork to better understand joy, let me return to the question on so many minds: How can we experience joy in dark and troubling times?

My sister Julie was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in late 2017. Over a period of five years she had gone through one nine-hour surgery, six rounds of chemo, three recurrences, and two clinical trials when, in April of 2023, she’d exhausted all treatment options. As she told our family, “This is about me taking control of my life.”  

Julie’s decision to stop treatment came about two weeks before her 61st birthday. She’d already told us that she wanted a party. With her decision to end treatment, her celebration suddenly morphed into a combined birthday bash and—going-away party? “We’ll have games!” one of my nieces exclaimed. A close friend of Julie’s spent a week feverishly fashioning a globe-shaped piñata, fashioned with interior wooden supports covered by layers of papier-mâché, and painted in a shout-out teal (the official color of ovarian cancer advocates). Her friend Val stenciled on it, “Beat the Shit Out of Cancer.”

When the time came, Julie took the first whack at the piñata. We clapped. We hooted and hollered. We each got our turn with the plastic bat, laughing uproariously as we released years of rage and pain and love. Whack! Whack! Whack! Finally the globe burst open, littering the deck with Kit Kats, gummies, pansy seed packets, and other goodies. I remember thinking, “Creation and destruction, joy and sorrow, celebration and grief. Here we were simultaneously holding such diametrically opposed emotions—joy with sorrow and loss lurking in the periphery.

Together, we inhabited a liminal space between life and death, a space large enough to hold both our joy and our sorrow. As I looked around the patio at Julie’s loved ones, I saw tears and heard sobs. I also noted the reverberation, the whispers of joy at being together, the collective holding of hands as we supported Julie in her remaining time. “How lucky are we?” I asked myself, as we moved on to the two birthday cakes, one symbolizing celebration and the other, grief.

When Julie died two months later, all of us who loved her were consumed with grief. I recognized that I was “weeping for that which has been your delight” and that the intensity of the pain was in proportion to the delight she had brought to our lives. It did not lessen the grief, of course, but I have learned to hold that grief side by side with the joy. The joy of loving Julie will always win over the pain of losing her—and I can call on that joy any time, no matter how awful things seem, because it lives within me.

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