In this episode we explore why joy is so important in work - and what happens if we fail to include it
He’d been a builder, he’d said, though retired now. Specialised in repairs and maintenance on the older buildings. He was driving me through Castlemaine, showing me all the places he’d worked on, telling me what he’d done in each place. “I did the chimney on that one, y’see that?”, he said, pointing to a hundred-year-old heritage-listed house. “I re-did them windows there, too”, pointing to another place that dated back to the gold-rush years, “it’s hard to get the right glass for them these days, youse ‘ave to get it just right, ya know?” We turned a corner to go down the main street. “Yeah, an’ I did the rebuild on the inside of the old Telegraph Station, an’ the patch-up on the outside too - looks right proper now like what it should do, don’ it?”
The work had taken its toll, though: I could see that one of his fingers was missing, and he walked with an evident limp. “Bloody idiot trainee kid, that was, he dropped one of them big bloody lintel-stones on me leg when we was workin’ on the Telegraph, didn’ he? Smashed it all up, he did, though at least the stone stayed okay - me foot can mend, but we can’t fix the stone if it’s buggered, now can we?” Yet behind that, even more evident in his voice, was the quiet joy, the pride in the quality of his work: that in a sense he’d literally built himself into the history of the town.
Happiness is often short-lived; gaiety even more so. Yet joy is something different: it includes everything - not just a brief brightness, but also an acknowledgement of the pain, the sorrow, the sheer hard work. And once we do find that deeper joy, it lasts forever.
If we’re working towards creating a better world, we need to include enough space for joy.
Yet where’s the joy now? It’s rarely allowed at work: most current workspaces are soulless, soul-destroying, completely devoid of joy. Most present-day politics is even worse. And religion? - isn’t that supposed to be a space where joy can exist? Not these days: in too many cases, too many countries, it’s descended into a steaming dog-pile of arrogance, abuse, hypocrisy, and relentless, irredeemable hatred of the Other. No joy to be found there; no joy allowed, even.
The nearest to joy that remains in those spaces is schadenfreude, a sick pleasuring at others’ pain - which is about as far from real joy as it’s possible to get. All too often, all we’re left with is a crushing sense of pointlessness, purposelessness, sadness, emptiness. Who would want to continue living in a world like that?
Fine. So, yeah, it’s a world so often seemingly devoid of joy: bleak, empty, debilitating, dispiriting. And yeah, it’s all too true that we can’t go on living like this. But that’s not the same as “we can’t go on living”: instead, it’s more that the ‘like this’ bit is the part we need to focus on, and that we need to change.
So what can we do about it? What small changes might we make, to make a difference here?
Quite a lot of options, actually.
Scroll back through the eighty or so episodes on this SmallChanges Substack - probably at least half of them have practical suggestions about themes to focus on, about rethinking how we look at the world. There’s the series of posts about imagining a world without money, and how to build towards that world. There’s that post about price, value, worth and cost, and how to reframe what we understand as ‘value’. There’s the post on ‘dancing in limbo’, about how to keep going, joyfully, even when every plan has been shredded and no way forward, no way back. And there’s that one that reminds us that it’s not Sisyphus, and yes, the work is always there, and often hard, tedious, repetitive, yet we also need always to remember this:
Find the joy; share the work; remember to dance whilst doing it. And share it with everyone you meet. It matters. It matters to us all.
And more tools we can use: the post on ‘How to build better lives’, for example; the one on finding small pleasures in the everyday; another one on seeing the outcomes of past work, much like that builder shows above. The ones on how to make use of chaos, or of Murphy’s Law; the ones on how to build a sense of belonging, or how to find friends and allies even within this increasingly-challenging world; the ones on the practices of noticing and of hope, the optimism of blossoming, and on working together with others in turning the tide.
It’s all there: each one of them illustrating some way to create an opening for joy, a real space within which joy may quietly emerge.
Oh, and there’s also the importance of avoiding those downward-spiralling joy-killers that tear us down and destroy our ability to care. Over-dependence on anger and resentment about unfairness and the like are obvious examples, of course, but there are also those that we explored in the posts about paediarchy and the covert crybaby; about the ‘deadly addiction’ of possessionism and the risks of letting things sink into decrepitude; about the ‘giggle-wrecker’ and the ‘cackling’ that comes up so quickly from the wrong type of game; about the dangers of hypocrisy and loss of honesty; or when any or all of these combine together into an even-more-lethal brew.
True, each of those is a part of our present-day world: that’s a bleak fact that, yeah, we do need to face. Yet if we want to create any space for joy in our lives, then leaving such issues to fester unnoticed and unaddressed is most definitely Not A Good Idea: we ignore that point at our peril.
We also need to remember, again, that joy is different. It’s subtle; shy, even. It’s not something we can control: we can’t simply set up some pre-planned conditions and expect it to magically appear, such as we can often do to create a short-lived gaiety or happiness.
Yes, as we’ve seen above, there are conditions in which joy is more likely to arise. Yet behind it all, we most need to work with how joy works. It emerges, quietly, slowly, in its own time, on its own terms, its own ‘dignity of the absurd’. If we allow it to happen, it creeps up on us, happily, silently, sideways-on, almost unnoticed until it’s suddenly there: “surprised by joy”, was how one colleague put it.
And yes, that often does include an acceptance of pain, of loss, of sadness, of grief. Unlike mere happiness, joy arises from being real.
So where’s the joy? Short answer: wherever we allow ourselves to find it - or, perhaps, wherever we allow it to find us.
Hi Tom
My joy has tended to be external to work to a large extent, with my son who has cerebral palsy and was expected to only live to five or six, and despite epileptic fits etc. will be turning 30 in February next year. I am not saying that joy cannot be found in working conditions but is solely dependent on the organizational culture in a particular organization. Having worked for 47 years in financial services i can confirm that they tend more towards command and control than Joy.
Oh well,
We each have to find joy where we can, in our own contexts, sometimes in the workplace but more often away from it.
I'd like to suggest that rather than looking for joy that progress in our work is what helps. What I mean is it's a clear sense of progress relative to a meaningful goal or objective that brings satisfaction. Alas, with much knowledge work 'immeasurement' is a real problem.