"Happiness, she explains, depends on things going well. It's cumulative, fragile, and easily undone. Joy, by contrast, can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty. It doesn't erase what's broken - it helps hold it together. Drawing from psychology, faith traditions, and her own experience living with stage four cancer, Bowler explores why joy is less about ease and more about connection, openness, and love. It's not a mood or an achievement, but a way of seeing reality clearly and still saying yes to life. Joy, she suggests, isn't a bonus for the fortunate. It's something that carries us when happiness no longer can."
"KATE BOWLER: You can be joyful and sad at the same time, but you can't be happy and sad at the same time. That's what makes joy often, like, so confusing to people. My name is Kate Bowler, and I'm a historian and a podcaster and a writer, and I study issues about luck and meaning and what makes life, well, beautiful. Joy can coexist with the deepest and often most painful emotions because it is this bright, enlivening feeling. Joy has this way of binding together all these broken pieces and still making you laugh at the exact same time, which honestly is why I think it's, like, the most interesting thing to study."
Joy differs fundamentally from happiness, which depends on things going well and is cumulative and fragile. Joy can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty without erasing brokenness; instead it helps hold broken pieces together. Joy arises from connection, openness, and love and functions as a way of seeing reality clearly while still saying yes to life. Joy is not a mood or an achievement and is accessible beyond fortunate circumstances. Lived experience with infertility, sudden good fortune, and life-threatening illness illustrates how joy can persist and bind together moments of sorrow and laughter.
Read at Big Think
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]