Where's the joy?

Feb 07, 2023

In this episode we explore why joy seems to be so absent at work and elsewhere - and what to do about that…

Back in the cafe again, in part to work on some book-ideas, but also to continue working on that whole theme of reinventing myself, particularly in terms of the kinds of work I’d want to be doing as I go forward into the future.

I’d made plenty of notes, particularly on the latter: I’d written out a detailed list of core concepts and questions, made another three-page list of all the tools that I’d developed over the past few years, and even mapped out some worked-examples of how to use those tools to tackle some common business-issues. All looking good.

Yet suddenly, a realisation that something important was missing: where’s the joy?

As I wrote in the notebook:

The real struggle here:
I can make any number of lists of tools.
I can make any number of tool-sequences, that show how to chain tools together to tackle almost any question.
Yet where’s the joy in that?
There isn’t any. It’s just slog-work, doing the same old pointless stuff. Useful, yes, but feels pointless now.
Finding joy is a mandatory success-criterion for me - but there’s none there.
Intellectual challenge, yes: but no joy.
So, not something I want to do.
But what work can I do that would bring in any real element of joy?
I don’t know. So I’m still stuck. Oh well.

Oops…

I’m not the only one facing this, of course. Far from it.

More like just about everyone I know is facing that same challenge, in one way or another.

Where’s the joy in the world of work? In the business-world, joy seems not so much absent, as explicitly designed-out. It that sense, it seems to be yet another aspect of how autonomy, mastery and purpose were all intentionally expunged from the workplace as part of ‘scientific management’s often-questionable quest for ever more ‘efficiency’ - science often claiming to be ‘emotion-free’, of course. Or, perhaps, the more cynical of us might say that that mirrors the debilitatingly-dysfunctional end of Puritan or Calvinist culture, in which joy itself is a sin; or maybe more just that serfs and slaves at work should not be allowed joy if the masters themselves have none. Either way, it ain’t there. Oh well.

Where’s the joy in the wider world? Okay, yes, it’s been there, from time to time - but to be blunt, this really ain’t one of those times. The global COVID pandemic is far from over, with others never far away; the parasites, paediarchs and covert-crybabies behind big-business and the stock-market are getting greedier and more demanding every year, with no apparent political means or will to pull it back to less-insane levels; after seventy years of relative peace, we have full-blown war back on in Europe again, with risk of even worse on the horizon elsewhere, and smaller though no less devastating armed-conflicts seemingly still scattered all around the globe; the so-called ‘the economy’ is becoming ever more fragile and brittle, as the inherent-absurdity of ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’ slowly sinks in; and politics becomes ever more polarised seemingly everywhere in the relentless search for someone else to blame. Yeah, it’s a mess - and there ain’t much room for joy when things get that bad.

Yet without it - without at least some real room for joy in our lives, at work and elsewhere - we’re often left with a sense of emptiness, pointlessness, not a life worth living. When joy is lost, it’s hard to keep hold of hope; and when hope is lost, it can be hard to keep going at all. And yeah, we can’t go on living like this…

But that’s the point, isn’t it? As I wrote in almost the first episode here, it can be entirely true that ‘We can’t go on on living like this’, but that’s not the same as ‘can’t go on living’: the trick is to change the ‘like this’ part. So let’s change it!

And this is where ‘small changes’ comes into the story. Sure, the big challenges arising from this global mess will require big changes, many of them at very large scale indeed: yet everything starts out from small changes. And all of those small-changes start out from small things that are in our choice, in our control. No matter how large the challenge may be, ultimately it’s up to us.

So let’s turn this round: find space for humour, laughter, friendship, joy. Make those small changes in what we do, to make work worthwhile again, to make living worthwhile. The answer to ‘Where’s the joy?’ is ‘wherever we create it’ - so let’s do that! Let’s go!