What is a joyful life?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. What's up at Whole Foods Market.

1:00Hello and welcome to the conversation from the BBC World Service. This is the programme that explores the female perspective through the lives and insights of two women from around the world. I'm Dashie Arnie, never-ni-gum. Now, the wellness industry promises the secret to a happier life. Social media tells us everyone else has already found it. But what if we've misunderstood what it means to be joyful altogether? Well, it's something both my guests have thought deeply about and explored in personal ways. Joining us from the United States is Kate Boehler, an historian and podcaster and author of Joyful Anyway, which was written after she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Anne-Marit Kaepler is a Swedish journalist and prize-winning author, whose interview people all over the country on their life experiences, thoughts and approaches to love and happiness. Kate and Marit are very well welcome to the conversation. Hello. Hello. Thank you. Hello.

2:03First of all, Joy, like many feelings, it's quite hard to pin down. So, Kate, if we could start with you, I wonder how you would define it. It's a big, bright, in-living feeling. It almost feels like paddles to the chest like it startles your wake. And it's a set of positive emotions that engage our dopamine. But weirdly, it also engages our stress system, which helps explain why in a moment of joy, you kind of have the sense that you can be in a situation you might hate. But suddenly, it's like it opens up and you feel like, yes, how wild it is so good to be alive. Marit, what do you think? I'm fascinated about how joy is related to a lot of other words or feelings or concepts like. And I find it a bit hard to define the borders between joy and, for instance, peace of mind, like inner peace, and joy and delight, happiness, euphoria, ecstasy,

3:10maybe. And what's the difference between joy and luck? I mean, there are differences between all these things, but they are also related somehow. I find that really interesting, because a lot of people would think, as you said, joy, and especially something like happiness are exactly the same emotion. But Kate, are they really? Yeah, I did think they were the same. I just figured like they're both positive. We like them. Let's try it. But it turns out like happiness has kind of a distinct psychological profile, because it will feel like ease. It comes from that word hap, like hapenstance, meaning like things that happen to you. And that really helped me see happiness as a much more incremental built out of a lot of small details. It's like the temperature of your coffee and you get to call a friend later and it's a beautiful day. Like, it's built out of small things. I kind of picture happiness like a jenga tower. And it's fragile,

4:14but it's really quite lovely when it gets tall. This might sound like a very silly question, but how do you both know when you are experiencing joy, Marit? It's a warm feeling inside. It's like a warm feeling in the stomach or in the chest. Yeah. Kate, what about you? I like that. That's a nice description. But I asked kids how they feel when they feel joy. And they said like bursting or like balloons. Or like when you see a penguin, I thought those were fantastic descriptions. But I think I look for three kind of like kind of cousins to joy. Does it make you feel hopeful? Like things might be lovely tomorrow. Does it delight you? Because it kind of has to light you up. And does it give you this little feeling of thank you? Just like whatever this is, big or small, thank you. Kate, you've written your books after you became ill. I just wondered how did your

5:17diagnosis change what you thought joy actually was? And I'm really mindful that we are specifically using the word joy in this program, rather than happiness. Yeah. The question of like what is joy came to me in a mystery, which is that after my diagnosis, I was like utterly heartbroken. I thought I would die that summer. I had a little kid this life I really loved had just suddenly washed away. It felt like there just was an avalanche and everything that was good and built up over decades was just gone. And yet I had this little strange stretch in the hospital and in the couple weeks after where I felt this weird bubble-wrappy kind of floaty feeling. And I thought well, something's very wrong with me. Or there's something else. And when I look back, I realize it was joy. It was this weird feeling like I could see everything that was really beautiful about my life, but it didn't erase the reality of what was going on. And I think the surrealness of knowing you

6:23can have joy even in the worst moment of your life is what made me so deeply curious about this phenomenon in the first place. Why do you think you were experiencing joy in that moment? As you said, you were in hospital and you thought you were going to die and you thought you were leaving a lovely life behind. I think one of the weirdest parts and I really mean weird is that joy is a surprise. Like it's you can't schedule it and you can't optimize your way into it. So even though I would have liked to say like it's because I'm an amazing person. I created all these amazing preconditions. It just visited me like an opening of the aperture. Kind of like you could see everything and suddenly you're kind of in love with the world again. And that is one quality of tragic time that I've heard a lot in other people's stories of really difficult moments. But I think what's so surreal about joy is that it's not math. Like it doesn't, it's not in create,

7:25it doesn't add up. I went from zero to a hundred. And I think that's why the words gift and surprise are very good words to associate with an experience of joy. Matt, you've also noticed this theme that something special happens when people overcome obstacles linked to joy. Yeah, I checked my books and a play I wrote and I searched for the word joy and when did people express joy in the interviews I made? And it was clear that nobody expressed joy in in combination with having a lot of money for instance or other status connected things. But instead several people expressed joy coming after overcoming obstacles like hardships. That made them feel joy and they were proud of themselves that they had met a challenge.

8:29Sometimes they were happy to be helped by others. And that created happiness or joy. Like for instance a girl who was struggling with high school and then she expressed how joyful she felt on the day of graduation and also because her parents had stood by her. Yeah, that was really beautiful I think. Okay, you've really focused on this feeling of joy in your books. What is it that you're hoping people will understand from it? I guess because this culture is so fixated on making everything into homework particularly for women. Like be grateful hope you're keeping a gratitude journal making core memories with your child. I hope you've got a skin care routine like everything has come down to us as a set of imperatives to build a best life now. And it's lovely if you can have it. It's unbelievably expensive and it's just quite unrealistic for most women who are wrapped up in caregiving and attempts at modest ambition and

9:36just trying to live any kind of like beautiful life. And so my deep hope is that if we can't then build always a happy life like what is there for the rest of us. And I think it's true that we can promise each other that you actually are made for joy. You have an incredible capacity for it. You don't have to earn it. And it can visit you in the most unlikely circumstances and remind you of just how much your life is worth living. It sounds like you think joy is our natural state of being. It's deeply natural as in we have a capacity for it but it's actually quite odd and doesn't show up very often. And so every time someone says like I live a life of joy I'm like your liar. It doesn't happen very often. It's actually an unusual experience. You've set the bar too high. What do you think the value is of writing about and learning about so-called ordinary lives? Yeah so I interviewed the people living in my home village in the countryside or it's rather a hamlet. It's very small. I wanted to listen to the story of their lives basically. And

10:42some of them came to this hamlet from other places like one woman. She was a refugee from Eastern Germany as a child in the 40s after World War II and she expresses how some people seem to be more capable of being joyful and that's not fair. I mean I'm referring to your expression of the gift in joy and some people have the capacity of looking at life from the bright side somehow and while it's harder for other people and it's hard to do anything about that. Are you saying that some people have a natural propensity to have a more positive outlook? I think so. Yeah it's your psychological predisposition somehow. It seems like that to me when people tell their stories. How some people are always optimistic and like for instance one man I met him walking on the road

11:44with a rock sack coming from the grocery store close to my village and that's not usual. I mean usually people drive and so I stopped him and I interviewed him for a few minutes and he said I lost my driver's license and I didn't ask him how but he lost his driver's license and then he started to walk to the grocery store and then he found out that this was very good for his health and for his diabetes so he was super happy he never took the driver's license again and that to me he seemed to me being a very strong personality being able to view this loss to make it again instead. You're listening to the conversation from the BBC World Service. September's always busy. Whole Foods Market can help. Their September stock-up event makes it easy to load your pantry and freezer with flavorful nourishing food. Even better there are hundreds

12:47of sales. Get dinner going with canned soups and veggies. Lean on frozen pizzas, pastas and seafood everyone loves. They're build your own family meals feeds for for just $35. Stock up at Whole Foods Market. The deadlines, the pressure, the tension. You may just brush it off as stress but is your hair I gotta tell you it's eating us alive. Weakening are very roots, breaking us apart. And the more you stress the more we slip away. Now please take a deep breath there's something you can do. Pantene abundant and strong systems strengthens your hair against stress reducing 85% only the strongest will survive the shedding. Pantene abundant and strong. I'm Dashieh Anine van Aigem and my guests today are the historian and podcaster Kate Boehler from the United States and the Swedish journalist Ann author Marit Kapler and what it means to be joyful in a world that increasingly commodifies it. So Kate the title of your book is Joyful

13:52Anyway, which suggests a kind of determination to enjoy life regardless of what is going on in it. I totally agree that people have a basic predispositions to either optimism or what we worry about diseases of despair. Some people seem very bouncy. There's always bounce back. Other people seem to fall all the way down. But the anyway for me is is there joy out there no matter what and the no matter what is is like such a bold claim. Like can it come to us in moments of undoing? Can it come to us when we have very little and in so many of the stories that I've heard and things I've experienced it's sometimes when we're in a very precarious situation that we're actually more likely to experience joy kind of as a grace a thing that happens to us. Like I had a very weird situation where I was bitten by a poisonous copperhead snake in my suburban lawn near my house like not in forest not far away.

15:00I'm from Canada so I'm like horrified by the creatures where I live in North Carolina. But it was bitten by this snake and it's like it's a big deal. Ten minutes into the hospital trip they were trying to decide if I was going to keep the leg. And at this point I was like come on. Like I survived cancer just like give me a break. I had been through enough. Thank you. And I found that I was very angry and emotional being back in the emergency room where they had previously sent me home when I really in fact had been complaining of stage 4 cancer symptoms at the time. So being back there I was like full of rage and I was really loudly monologuing about everything that happened. And this like loving nurse she looked at my chart and she listened to me and I was like look I'm not trying to be a crazy person but like I just can't believe I'm the person that bad things keep happening to and I have to admit like I am not taking this wall. She could see that I was like struggling to reconcile a life that just kind of keeps coming apart and she said look a hospital is never going to apologize. But I just if you could hear it from me I just want you to know that I am

16:03so sorry this happened but I'm so sorry that this happened to you here where we should have been taking care of you. Tears are like streaming down both of our faces but like I felt her mercy as a gift. And I think this is what joy is it's temporary wholeness. I just had this one moment of like surreal beautiful joy. And I think it's really heartening to know that joy can come to us from outside and it's also a gift that we can give each other. That's interesting that you say joy can come from outside and from another person because Marit you've also written a book called Love in Sweden which is based on a film. Were relationships a source of joy and to what extent? Yeah that's a good question. I find that when people speak about romantic relationships I have come to question more like the ecstatic love as passion and it's almost bordering on madness.

17:04And that is a very strong feeling but more and more when people were telling stories about that kind of love it somehow often led to maybe a destructive relationship and it didn't turn out well but people who seemed to be content satisfied in a more moderate way they spoke about finding joy in simple things like solving a crossword together. And it didn't have anything to do with the length of the relationship because some people who spoke like that they had been married for over 50 years and some people maybe they met when they were in their 60s or 70s but still they expressed the joy in the same way. The joy in just being together. Kate you are nodding away. Oh well it was just a it was a real debate I had about what ordinary joy means because sometimes

18:05when people tell you about what makes them joyful they're like my favorite latte or you know a Taylor Swift song and I'm like that's not joy but this is not quite true there is something joyful in ordinary things so what is it and doesn't have to be super dramatic it can be kind of a little shimmer of transcendence on an ordinary Tuesday and I think it's because in a moment like that it's almost like something opens up where you say wow it didn't have to be this way like isn't it so good that this is where we're at I had a moment like that the other day where I have this beautiful little son that I'm so grateful to have because I had infertility for years and um I've got this dad who was depressed all my life who is now doing really well and I could hear them in the other room talking over FaceTime they were just like chattering on about what they thought Winston Churchill must have been feeling at a difficult time and it was so dumb and so silly it's so normal but like it was I had this like oh my gosh I can't believe

19:11that I got to have this moment of like just it is like ordinary joy of like my dad and my son together at last and I think we can just feel it's like this guy opens up for a second and we feel that little wholeness and it can happen over crossword puzzles or just like yeah Tuesday from social media to podcasts we are surrounded by messages telling us that we can optimize every part of our lives from sleep to relationships but also to our well-being and happiness and joy Kate do you think we've just turned joy into another thing to achieve? Absolutely the number of women screaming choose joy on Instagram is deafening and it's just not true you can be somebody who is more likely to have the kind of emotional flexibility to experience life as a surprise so yeah you can open yourself up to joy in that way but you cannot optimize for joy you can't schedule it joy is going to be utterly slippery and that's what is going to make it so

20:13precious. Now what's so refreshing about the work that you've done is rather than talking purely influences or experts you know you've traveled around talking to ordinary people do you find that people in Sweden are under more pressure to be happy now is that something they spoke about? It's hard for me to say because my books they are not like based on statistics or it's not like scientific research but what I think is it's really hard to tell someone that you are not joyful I mean in the interviews most people of course and I would too talking to a stranger maybe I wouldn't say I'm not really happy I have no joy in my life because that's a failure and then it would be on me it would be what have I done to not succeed in being joyful? On that note then what are the barriers to joy? Marit? I think as with love it might be the images

21:22that also Kate were speaking about I mean you have a preconception what is a joyful life? How will you find joy and then there are very strong forces in this society that wants you to to buy things basically so they tell you you will be more happy and more joyful if you have these shoes this look this house this family so it's also about many people speak about how they finally became joyful when they accepted that they weren't following the norms and they decided this is my way of living my life and then they became more joyful so I think accepting that your life might not be the model normal life that you see everywhere you look but it can still be a joyful life you know when we talk about sort of is joy possible when you're just living a normal everyday life

22:23I mean sometimes you can go through life and nothing is terribly wrong but you still have this awful feeling of of blisslessness and feeling fed up how do you find joy in in that because that's almost harder I think Kate yeah definitely harder to recognize like the absence of joy and we want those top notes you know in our lives to feel because it's vitality joy is a feeling of kind of peak aliveness and so of course we want that but I I love what Mara was saying about accepting your own life like as part of it is being able to love the life you have which is very difficult and I think that's where it might be useful to lean into delight because delight is so specific to each person that's what makes it so wonderful and so dumb like what delights you will not delight me I do not enjoy being outside I think it's boring and God should have done better you

23:24know and normally that's where people go for like experiences of natural revelation I like going to visit world's largest objects I have visited the world's largest ball of twine it does not make any sense but I think that some part of seeing our lives like the tragic comedy of it all is being more comfortable with the absurdity of it like that we all live where we live we're stuck with the relationships we have but inside of it is this kind of live wire that we need to realize is specific to us and is kind of directly tied to our ability to have developed more capacity for joy you'd think that being sad is a barrier to joy but weirdly it's it's mostly routine and being positive that'll never happen to you I absolutely hear what you're saying this idea of leaning into the life you haven't accepting it but how do you ensure that that is authentic and you're not doing this performative I love my life I am happy I'm so happy I just love it thank you so much yes

24:24and if you ask every woman I'm so grateful I'm so grateful for the life I have on the surface they're they're actually both the same thing that you're doing so how do you make sure you're you're doing one naturally yes well I think this gets us to the feeling of surprise right so cs Lewis once called joy a stab of longing that's how you know you you're experiencing joy as you feel like you've been stabbed and the only reason that makes me laugh is because like we don't like the like ah of joy we want to say like this is me being joyful this is me being but I think what we've done is we've largely confused it with appearing grateful and appearing content and I think that if we recognize that if joy is a surprise our great work is in trying to make sure that we are people capable of being surprised most of us will be in our phones in our routines doing what we normally do that person is very difficult to surprise my how do we make sure that we take notice of joy when it does surprise us when

25:28it does come along yeah that's a really good question and isn't that what life is all about trying to to I mean you never know you you can think that you're happy and joyful and then you discover one year later that you were not happy or joyful I mean so you can this I mean self-deception is also is a strong skill it's a skill that many of us have unfortunately but so I'm just like to to listen to the people I have interviewed there are some some actions things like yeah for instance think about your life as successful even though you don't follow the norms but you can also find joy in caring for others that's something that several people talk about either if they work as for instance in the home care for elderly people or even though Kate doesn't

26:35like to be outside many people do speak about how they find joy being outdoors and like taking walks in nature and so my village is situated in the countryside and many people moved to this hamlet from urban areas in in Europe so not only in Sweden but also the Netherlands for instance or Hungary they are really content with their choice of place to live so you can think about all those things Kate do you have any advice I love what Merit was saying and I'm not about being outside which is such a disappointment and but I just think we should reiterate the very surprising connection between joy and service people who I mean there is an accidental narcissism to pain we are always believing that whatever is happening to us is somehow a singular experience and it

27:35tends to isolate us from other people there is a wonderful relationship between pouring ourselves in acts of service out into other people's lives and really surprising experiences of joy so one way other than just like be more surprisedable or I really like what you were saying about making seeing your own life as successful and like so you can sink into the enjoyment of it but another wonderful trick that's not a trick is be really invested in other people's stories and you will find that in forgetting yourself you rediscover yourself through someone else that's lovely thank you so much to both of you for this conversation it's been a delight I think so too thanks a lot my guest today have been historian and podcaster Kate Boehler and journalist and author Marit Kapler I'm Dashiehani Navanayagam and the conversation from the BBC World Service will be back again next week thank you for listening

28:36McDonald's is putting value back on the menu whether you're craving a big mac McNuggets or sausage egg and cheese McGrittle's make it a meal and save your favorite is now your wallet's favorite too extra value meals are back get a big something extra with a big mac or 10 piece McNuggets fries and a medium coke all for just nine dollars limited time only promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing it's fall in jeep country and during the driving to fall sales event get a great deal on four by fours that refuse to be contained like jeep rankler confidence built into every drive with the most awarded SUV ever jeep grand Cherokee and freedom that can't be denied with the open air freedom and jeep gladiator after 85 years it's no surprise that jeep became America's SUV brand yet a great deal during the jeep driving to fall sales event jeep is one more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV brand jeep and the jeep grill register trademarts of FCA US LLC