“Both my wife and daughter think I’m this gigantic loser, and… they’re right. I have lost something. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I know I didn’t always feel this… sedated. But you know what? It’s never too late to get it back.” — American Beauty by Alan Ball
If you ever feel like Lester Burnham, experiencing his mid-life meltdown in American Beauty, that you’ve lost something, you’re not alone. This loss is not just the innocence and dependence of childhood that we naturally grow out of, but something that we wake up one day and wonder where it went. It is joy.
Joy is the thing we trade for modern adult life. Ask yourself: when do you feel true joy? Getting up in the morning still half-asleep? Absent-mindedly eating breakfast as you run through your to-do list? Driving to work and listening to the news? Checking your e-mail? Sitting in meetings? Taking a hurried lunch? Trying to finish everything by 5:00? Sweating on machines in a crowded gym? Driving home? Going through the motions of making dinner? Talking about work and school? Getting your child to finish her homework? Watching TV? Trying to forget about work until tomorrow? This is how we learn to suffer in comfort.
The tedium and minutia that occupy much of our day don’t leave much room for joy. Joy is something we defer for our short-lived recovery periods of vacations and weekends, which in themselves often leave us feeling exhausted. It’s the lament of our modern condition that the harder we work for joy, the more relentlessly we pursue it, the more frustrated we become and the harder it is to capture. That is because it cannot be captured, it can only be experienced in the flow of purposeful play (see Only Dead Fish Go with the Flow).
Purposeful play is not the same as work. Work is forced, play is natural, the same as learning. At one point in the movie American Beauty, the drop-out husband played by Kevin Spacey, asks his career-obsessed wife Carolyn, played by Annette Benning, “Christ, Carolyn, when did you become so…joyless?” The answer is she and most of the rest of us lost it chasing the promise of leisure. Joy in modern life is so ephemeral that when it does happen, we’re too busy to notice or so desperate to hold on to it, that we become depressed once it subsides.
Is this to say that we shouldn’t work, or be responsible adults, or pursue success? Yes, exactly.
We can create value and enjoy the experience of meaningful contribution without work (see Workers of the World, Relax!). We can own our choices and be of service without smothering our child-like curiosity, joy and fascination. The moment we pursue success for its own sake, be it money, fame, or power, we have already lost the ability to enjoy the process, because we’re focused on the end game.
The joy we have lost is to be found again in those rare moments of spontaneity, creativity and connection to the beauty of the moment. Without it we’re confined to working for the weekend; losing ourselves in dreams of something better, oblivious to the simple pleasures of now. As John Lennon said, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
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