Joy is the key to Digital Well-Being
When was the last time you felt joy?
Are you feeling it right now? Are you feeling it because you’re away from your responsibilities? Are you feeling joy because you’re in nature or some other place you love? Maybe you’re feeling it right now because you’ve given yourself permission to rest. Are you feeling joy because you’re excited about what you might learn reading this blog post?
When was the last time you felt joy?
Where were you? Who were you with? Were you alone? What did it smell like? What could you hear? What were you doing? What could you see?
Close your eyes and take a moment with that memory.
The experience of joy involves two things: active noticing and nurturing. Noticing is about your attention. Nurturing is about your effort.
I believe that effortful living is the path to joy and I want to show you the steps you can take to get there but we can’t talk about any of that without an understanding of what I mean by joy.
Joy is what we all want
Joy isn’t necessarily happiness, or comfort, or delight. In fact, some of those things can be obstacles to joy.
I’ve spent a lot of time connecting to people, researching, and talking on the subject, and the bottom line is that joy is what we all want. What do we all want? Well-being and success. However we define them for ourselves.
Success means the attainment of our goals, whatever they are. Well-being is having a positive relationship with our limits and our abilities, whatever they are. Joy occurs when well-being and success exist simultaneously within us.
Beating FOMO means defining your success and your well-being and synthesizing them into a joy that is uniquely, profoundly and humanly yours.
The Algebra of Joy: Well-Being + Success
So, the first ingredient: success.
Do you consider yourself successful? If not, why not? If you do consider yourself successful, is your success the source of your joy? Do you need anything else? Why are you reading this post?
A definition of success that applies to every human being on the planet is pretty simple: the achievement of goals. The more goals we achieve, the more successful we are. Since it’s half of joy, we need goals in our life, always, if we want a shot at joy.
So, the real question is: how do we define these goals that will make us experience success?
If you live in a modern, technological, post-industrial society, as we do, your goals will probably be mostly professional: earn this much money or this degree, achieve this title, launch a successful startup. Someone who lives in a small village in the Himalayas might have goals like: stay warm, get to my neighbour’s house before dark so I don’t fall off a cliff, find all my sheep.
All these goals have something in common. They’re rooted in externalities, things outside ourselves. And that’s okay because most of life is about meeting challenges that arise from outside us. But if we’re seeking joy, we need to be aware of where external goals come from, because too often, external goals are set for us by entities that don’t care about our joy or need to work directly against our joy to profit.
Enter: FOMO.
FOMO: The Enemy of Joy
One hugely powerful force has gotten in the way of your joy: Fear Of Missing Out.
It’s one of the most powerful forces of the modern age. There’s no question that FOMO won the 2010s. A ten years inferno stoked by attention-grabbing, depression-breeding, bottom-of-the-brain-stem abusing online platforms, classic advertising slogans (You are not enough. You don’t have enough. You are not enough,) and Silicon Valley’s tech inevitability subterfuge.
Fear of missing out won the day.
Don’t believe for a moment though that FOMO just sprang into being in the last 20 years or so: it’s a symptom of some of the most fundamental forces that lie within us as social beings: the desire to belong, fit in, and know where we are in our tribe.
FOMO is unique. It’s part jealousy, part information overload, part insecurity, part anxiety, part low self-image. FOMO is externalizing our joy and using comparison as the main lens through which we judge our own worthiness. FOMO would be powerless if we didn’t, on some level, believe that what we choose to do, be and how we live is best evaluated by comparing ourselves to everyone we know.
I mentioned that FOMO isn’t a new concept, but we do have a FOMO epidemic like never before in history because of two forces that act like steroids for FOMO: capitalism and social media. These things aren’t intrinsically sinister but they’re both systems that are built in such ways that make it incredibly easy for toxic forces like FOMO to become more powerful than ever before.
The synergy between our modern technology and our modern economic system is that there’s a lot of interest out there in giving us FOMO, because FOMO keeps us glued to our devices, keeps us buying, keeps us hustling in side gigs.
FOMO has fed us a lie about what a good life is. Because ideas like FOMO tell us that success and well-being look one way: flawless, expensive, popular… and never complete.
The danger of forces like FOMO is not only in the pressure to try to do, be, and experience everything, it’s the lie that we’re told that it’s possible to.
You are Always Missing Out
The truth is, you are always missing out. Every moment of your existence is spent doing one thing to the exclusion of a literal infinity of other things. No matter what you choose.
FOMO’s core messages:
I’m not doing enough.
I don’t have enough.
I am not enough.
If you stopped believing all three of these at once, you’d never buy something you saw on Instagram, you’d never do a minute of unpaid overtime, you’d never doubt your worthiness to be loved, and a lot of people would make a lot less money on you.
Simply put, the antidote for FOMO is joy.
Okay, back to goals.
The First Element of Joy: Success
So, where do good goals come from? Behavioral psychologists have long established that the best goals, the ones most likely to be achieved positively, are specific, measurable, and time-sensitive.
In his raucous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, blogger and Internet entrepreneur Mark Manson says “The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it's giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.”
Meet Rebecca
My friend Rebecca has good goals.
She lives in a small house in a working-class neighborhood in Queens with her husband, a roommate, two dogs, a cat, a turtle, and a half a dozen chickens. She works as a freelance copywriter, English teacher, and psychotherapist.
Rebecca has never earned a six-figure salary in her entire life and isn’t likely to ever do so. She has no professional title that will ever mean anything outside the organizations she works with. You will probably never know who she is.
But Rebecca considers herself a W-I-L-D success.
Four nights a week, from about 7 to midnight, Rebecca’s house fills with friends- some of whom she’s known for over 30 years. They share meals, play cards, play video games, make cocktails, and watch stupid shows on Netflix.
She’s been with her husband for 15 years and they’ve weathered a lot of things: mental illness in the family, unemployment, and more.
Rebecca can also disappear into the wilderness for a month and probably come out having gained weight. She can speak three languages and cook hundreds of meals- none of which add to her after-tax earnings.
Rebecca has a collection of valued long-term relationships with people that are intensely, shockingly loyal, and has the soft and hard skills to physically survive just about anywhere in the world.
She has a home she can afford and animals she loves that love her back. She’s healthy, feels valued, and never does a moment more work than she wants to.
She’s NOT on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
Rebecca considers herself a wild success. So do I. Her goals are sustainable, positive, and don’t require her to derive her worth from any externalities that don’t have her best interests in mind.
Remember: success is the achievement of goals. It doesn’t matter how large or small a goal is. What does “a large goal” even mean? Is making a billion dollars a large goal? Is keeping a relationship for life? Which is larger?
Setting goals compatible with joy is about choosing them honestly, actively, and with self-awareness.
These elements are crucial- if we’re not honest about what we want when we set a goal, we’ll fail. Guaranteed. And worse yet, it won’t be the productive failure everyone’s obsessed with these days. It’ll be the failure that leads to quitting and despair.
When our goals are disconnected from joy - like the aim of building a healthier relationship with technology - they won’t survive setbacks. They won’t survive the inevitable hardships and challenges that come with being alive. They won’t last beyond our mood swings, social trends, or cravings.
This leads us to some serious crossroads. Remember, joy is missing out on some things to have others.
The important element is that the direction you take at the crossroads is chosen honestly, actively, and with self-awareness. They’re not easy choices. Joy is not easy. Own your choices. Celebrate them. Be honest with yourself at all times, even if you can’t always be honest with the outside world.
The Second Element of Joy: Well-being
When American academic and business consultant Clayton Christensen, the man famous for coining the tech industry’s favourite term: ‘disruption,’ was asked to address his students at Harvard, he turned it into a short book called How Will You Measure Your Life? that spends basically no time at all discussing disruption, market strategies or innovation - his areas of expertise. Instead, Christensen spends the whole book talking about well-being.
Why do I describe well-being as the second half of joy? And why aren’t I using the arguably more popular word “wellness?”
Be is a verb. “Being” describes the active maintenance of a state. Wellness, to me, is a descriptor, like wealth or beauty. You have it or you don’t. It’s outside of you. If you don’t have it, you probably want it and go chase it. I want to challenge you to think of well-being as your relationship to who you are instead of a pursuit of things you may or may not have.
Back to Christensen. On the last day of class, he asks his students to search for an answer to three questions:
How can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career?
How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
How can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail?
That last one sounds funny, but it’s not. Two of his classmates, including an Enron executive, did go to jail.
What does this have to do with well-being?
I want to propose to you today that your well-being is rooted, more than anything else you do in your life, in the quality and intimacy of your relationships. I have the research to back it up, including one of the most important studies of human flourishing, the Harvard Grant Study.
Genes are Good, Joy is Better
It was the capacity for intimate relationships (what they termed ‘warm relationships’) that predicted flourishing in all aspects of the participants’ lives.
I realize that this is a radical argument to make, that the bottom line of your well-being is quality relationships, but I mean it. Of course, things like diet, exercise, life balance, having a home, education, and so forth are parts of what makes well-being but the quality of your relationships is even more fundamental.
Why? Aside from the intrinsic benefit to your physical and mental health from having warm relationships, they facilitate the other parts: the diet, the exercise, the financial security.
When we have deep, meaningful, warm relationships, we have people looking out for us and helping us get the things we need. We know it’s easier to stick to a fitness program if you have a friend keeping you accountable. We know it’s easier to find a good job or get into a good school with friends that can refer, recommend, and advocate for you.
Likewise, you’re motivated to do the same: to support and care for the people on the other end of those bonds which empower, motivate, and energize you. One flows into the other.
It all begins and ends with warm relationships.
Let me give you a great example.
Meet Arax
Arax and I met through mutual people down at the rowing club. She was looking for a partner and so was I. I could tell there was a significant age spread, but we both wanted to row recreationally, so it was a good fit. It turns out Arax was a lot more hardcore than I was. One day, a couple of miles into our morning workout, I managed to pipe out: ‘Arax, how old are you anyway?” It turned out she was 60-something to my 30-something years old. The white hair should have given it away.
Arax had a habit of calling me ‘Mighty Christina,’ which just made me feel so powerful and capable inside. I loved hearing about her varied and exciting life. She had designed clothing for rowers, was an international liaison for a university, and had even worked at the United Nations. She’d had so much life experience.
One day we flipped our boat, which happens, and it can go one of two ways: it can bring out the worst in people, like any crisis, but we just laughed our asses off, swam ourselves back to shore and rowed back to the club looking like two drowned rats.
I enjoyed regularly spending time with someone so far outside my regular peer group, with someone older than I was, and that we enjoyed so much fun together.
I loved the connection to the water, seeing the sunrise, the smell of the morning air, and the wildlife. I loved pushing my body and my mind to focus on the momentum and swing of the boat. All of these things supported me being well.
Rowing is a sport that is obviously physically good for you, but it was the social bond and the connection to nature that were intrinsic to doing the sport that kept me coming.
That’s what I’m trying to tell you about how well-being actually works. The most successful people, the ones that Christensen told his students to emulate and the ones that flourished in the Grant Study, started with well-being and the success came as a consequence. When I partnered with Arax, I wanted to have fun, be outdoors, and connect with someone. Physical fitness, confidence, and self-discipline came as a consequence.
This example demonstrates two essential strategies for digital well-being.
Two Essential Strategies for Digital Well-Being:
1. The easiest way to get off tech? Find something better to do and lean into it.
2. Build weekly social commitments into your calendar. Show up.
Pursue warm relationships, and the rest will follow. Commit yourself to people that have committed themselves to you. It’s the only way you can expect the long-term dividends that come from warm relationships that the most successful subjects of the Grant study experienced.
Overcome Loneliness by Choosing Joy
Conversely? If you don’t have this, it’s pretty bad.
The average person in the United States has only one close friend, according to the American Sociological Review. One in four people has no confidantes - a close friend they can confide in - at all. Zero.
To make things worse, 75% of people say they are unsatisfied with the friendships they do have. Meanwhile, religious service attendance and other typical means of gathering in person are in decline. New ways of gathering in the real world can be hard to find.
This level of disconnection is dangerous to our health. Loneliness has been alleged to have the same impact on our life expectancy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, with a risk factor that rivals excessive drinking or obesity. It’s common sense that those things are bad for us: why is it so hard for us to understand that loneliness is just as real and deadly?
How do we end up being deprived, depriving ourselves, of this lifeblood that the most intelligent people have concluded makes our existence healthier, longer, and better?
Chasing other things, for one.
We tend to imagine that if we pursue and accumulate the short-term rewards that our society has set up for us, primarily wealth and material goods (or social media views and follows,) that we can deal with the touchy-feely stuff later. Maybe in retirement. Maybe when we’ve made so much money or gotten so far in our careers that we feel we can throttle back. But experience shows that we don’t.
In studying success and successful people, Clayton Christensen saw people think this way: people “tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward in their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families – only to find that by then their families were gone.”
Devote Your Time to What Matters
One of my favourite poets, Mary Oliver, believes that attention is the beginning of devotion. Much like you, my attention is pulled in a hundred different directions a day: towards creative projects and bills to pay, towards my children and endless household tasks. In short, it's spread thin.
Our most worthwhile goals and relationships require constant attention and devotion. Noticing and nurturing. We don't live or love well in rushing. We can only love so many people and do so many things well.
I began this post by asking: when was the last time you felt joy? Now, think about when the next time will be because it is in your own hands. I hope you see that. I hope you’ve seen how we’ve been fed a lie about where a good life comes from, usually by people with an interest in offering us access to it on their terms, and often at an invisible, terrible price.
I hope you’ve seen how your success isn’t externally defined by dollar amounts or follower counts, titles, degrees, units shipped, hours logged, or miles run, but by achieving the goals you’ve set for yourself, which may include those things, or not.
Real goals are yours, starting from inside you, and they happen when you tell yourself honestly what brings you joy.
I hope you’ve seen how wonderfully, simply, well-being is rooted in cultivating and maintaining warm relationships - with friends, family, partners, classmates, neighbours - anyone worthy of the time you choose to spend, who affirm you, raise you up, and with whom you can give and receive love.
I hope you’ve seen how, when you fill your lives with quality relationships, the other elements of physical, mental, and emotional health will flow more naturally and smoothly.
Remember: JOMO is the joy of missing out on the right things to make space for what matters most.
What matters most to you?
Joy is the Key to Digital Well-Being Take-Aways:
The experience of joy involves two things: active noticing and nurturing
Joy is what we all want (joy = well-being + success)
FOMO is the enemy of joy
JOMO is the joy of missing out on the right things to make space for what matters most
The easiest way to get off tech? Find something better to do and lean into it
Build weekly social commitments into your calendar, show up
