Why is joy declining — and how can we reverse it?

Original Medium Post HERE

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A conversation between Carolina Espinoza and Michael Norton

Mike Norton is Harvard Business School’s Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration and author of The Ritual Effect. Carolina is Marketing and Communications Coordinator at East Boston Social Centers.

This conversation has been lightly edited for this written format. This blog is part 2 of 2. The full video is here.

Why not use the same photo twice? See it again in part 1 of this blog.

How would you explain the decrease in Joy in recent years?

There is this question when we look around us: it seems like people are volunteering less, they’re donating less to charity, it seems like they’re getting more self-focused and less focused on other people.

One of the things that really adds to our lives — and we see this in our research, but lots of people have shown it — is having a feeling of impact, full stop. Most of our days, we go through them, we do stuff, we eat, we type, we work, we stand, we sit — you know, we do all these things, and it’s not really clear that we’re having an impact on the world.

Feeling like you have an impact on the world — this isn’t just me saying it, the data shows it — having an impact on the world makes us feel really good. If you do something and you can see that it had an actual effect on another person, that’s something that you can’t really get anywhere else, and it is hugely predictive of your happiness.

So when you think about, “Should I be volunteering?” — that’s kind of a pain. “Should I be donating?” — well, I kind of want to buy myself something else. When you do those other things, you’re giving up the feeling of impact, and that feeling is something that I think we should chase more.

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We believe Joy lives in Community. How do you think Joy can be increased in a community?

One of my favorite pieces of research over the last few years is not mine. It’s from some colleagues, Juliana Schroeder and Nick Epley, who did this really clever study. They asked people, “How pleasant is it to interact with a stranger?” and people say, “Very unpleasant, I don’t want to do that at all, I don’t want to get trapped, the person might be a weirdo.”

We think of all these negative things, but they do the research where they actually force people to do it. They tell people before they get on a bus, “You have to talk to somebody that you haven’t met before,” or on a train or elsewhere.

What they show is that we’re wrong, actually — that when we have these conversations with people, they do make us happier. We just avoid them because we think of the worst-case scenario. But what typically happens is, you have sort of a nice chat about something random, and you’re smiling because you’re trying to be nice, and they’re smiling because they’re trying to be nice.

Compared to just staring at your phone, of course, it’s better to chat with somebody than to just be here. So again, I think we lose opportunities to create community by being so focused on what we’re doing right in front of us and missing the fact that there are people around us who we could chat with. Not for five hours, and we’re not going to marry them or anything like that — but they’re right there, and the research shows that not only would we be happier, but they get the benefit as well.

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What brings you Joy?

The biggest source of joy — I was just talking about this actually with some friends who are also parents earlier today — the biggest source of joy: kids. Kids can be difficult, of course, but they’re the most amazing thing as well because you get joy from the things that they do that you used to get joy from — they kind of bring it back for you.

So we went apple picking — of all things, we went apple picking, which if you don’t have a kid — and I’m 49, I probably wouldn’t go apple picking just on my own at this point — but when you have a kid, they remind you that there’s joy all around you in the world.

If they see ice, they are so happy and excited about the ice: “Where did the ice come from? What do we do with the ice?” We lose, again, these opportunities for these small moments of joy. Just being around kids — my daughter, of course, in particular, but kids in general — they get joy out of things, and they remind you that you can, too.

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