Joy is as necessary to us as air, and just as hard to hold onto.
Everyone seeks joy and happiness. It’s inherent to our nature as human beings. But we don’t always have a very clear picture of what joy means, or what brings it about. We recognize it when we encounter it: a surge of life within us, a ray of sunlight illuminating the soul. Yet that ray is often hidden behind clouds, and the things that promise us joy often leave us, in the end, empty-handed.
Moments of joy are varied and unpredictable—a sweet strain of music that seeps into the ear unexpectedly, the sight of a deer arcing its way through a field of grass at dusk, the blood-pumping exhilaration of a fast-paced sport, a circle of friends enjoying conversation and laughter. We chase moments like this; sometimes we win the prize, sometimes we come up with nothing. The unpredictability can be infuriating.
It would require many books to completely explain joy and what prompts it. However, there are a few important questions about joy that can be answered in the span of a brief essay.
Joy in Goodness
First, is joy something we achieve or something we receive? Writer Sofia Cuddeback asked that question in her article “Regarding Joy” in Volume 3 of “Hearth & Field” magazine. Cuddeback doesn’t offer a direct response to that question in the essay, but she does weave together an indirect and nuanced reply by analyzing the nature of joy. Drawing on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Cuddeback argued that joy is the resting of the will in some present good. In other words, joy results when our heart possesses some good thing—specifically, the type of good that we can grasp and appreciate through our mind. (This is distinct from goods that appeal merely to the senses, like a delicious food.)
Cuddeback provided some examples of goods that we can grasp with our mind or intellect: “[T]he appreciation of the beauty in sacrifice, and the admiration of the virtues of a particular friend.” Here are some more: the awareness of another person’s love, the experience of something beautiful in nature, the grasping of some important truth, the performance of a good work, or the enjoyment of an activity that activates our imagination and creativity.
Whenever we achieve one of these types of goods, we experience joy. “When we acquire the object of our intellectual appetite and rest in it,” Cuddeback wrote, “when we let ourselves be mindful of it and sit within it, metaphorically speaking—that is called joy. Joy is what we experience when we rest in something that is good and that we love.”
As Cuddeback pointed out, we can experience more joy by heightening our awareness of good things around us. A spirit of gratitude comes into play here. Since we only experience joy over things we already have, then if we fail to notice or be grateful for the good things we have, becoming preoccupied with what we don’t have, it’s very difficult to experience joy.
Moving on too quickly from one good to another can also sabotage joy. “If we are distracted from the thing that we love, however, going on to the next pursuit instead, then we are no longer resting in that good,” Cuddeback wrote. It would follow that a life of joy requires learning to slow down and be mindful about the goods that surround us.
For all these reasons, Cuddeback advises practicing awareness and appreciation for what we possess. She also speaks of forming our desires to center around the types of goods that give the highest and most lasting joy: things that are truly noble, lovely, beautiful, pure, and so on. Finally, she says we should try to surround ourselves with such things so we can drink the joy that wells up from them.
Joy in Selflessness
Another component of joy seems to be selflessness. Counterintuitively, human beings seem to derive more genuine joy and happiness from serving than from being served—though it can take a lifetime of wasted attempts and shattered expectations to learn this. As Joshua Becker wrote in “Things That Matter”: “Somewhere along the way (or maybe it’s always been like this), it appears we human beings confused the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of self. As a result, we think we’ll be happiest if we focus on ourselves, spend our resources on ourselves, and meet our own needs and desires—sometimes even at the expense of others.”
But this is completely the wrong approach, according to Becker. Paradoxically, genuine joy seems to increase proportionally to the degree that we forget ourselves and focus on others. “The best, most direct pathway to lasting happiness and fulfillment is to look not only at your own interests but also at the interests of others,” he argued.
Achieving joy and happiness is a bit like shooting an arrow. If you aim right at the bullseye (happiness), the arrow will drop by the time it reaches the target, and you’ll end up with nothing. But if you aim for something above happiness—meaning, purpose, love, or sacrifice—the arrow will find its way to joy. Becker makes this point when he quotes the famous psychologist and Nazi concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” “[H]appiness … cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
To prove his point, Becker cited two studies—a 2017 study from the University of Pittsburgh and a 2018 study from Columbia University—that both uncovered a surprising psychological truth: Giving actually brings more joy than getting. Participants in both studies were offered opportunities to either assist others or do something that benefited themselves. In both studies, the people who chose to help others were happier and calmer than those who chose to benefit themselves.
Where Does Joy Come From?
So—to return to the question we began with—is joy something we achieve or something we receive? I think the answer is a bit of both. We can foster dispositions of joy, and we can create circumstances that allow joy to emerge, but we also always receive it partly as a mysterious gift. It’s not as simple as just “deciding” that we have joy; at the same time, we can decide to develop attitudes that make joy more attainable. Among those attitudes would seem to be servant-mindedness, gratitude, and an appreciation for whatever is good, true, and beautiful.
