An announcement for Gen X-ers: Joy is a legit work principle
“A lot of us were taught that unless you were in constant pain, you were doing it wrong. ”
I entered the workforce in 1992 and throughout the formative years of my career I don’t think I ever heard the word joy associated with work. In fact anything worthwhile, be it academia, fitness, earning a living etc. was serious business so joy, as we understood it, had no role to play. Quite the opposite; hard stuff was supposed to suck all the time and searching for something like joy in it meant you were not meeting the challenge head on. A lot of us were taught that unless you were in constant pain, you were doing it wrong.
Joy is a skill
For my fellow gen X-ers, I think something needs to be said about this. Despite what we were told, finding the joy in the things is an excellent principle with which to approach work. It means any act you are engaged in, even when it’s tedious or painful, can have meaning beyond just the desired outcome. That results in better work. I'm not talking about happiness. People confuse the two. Happiness is complicated - joy is simple. I like to think of joy as a skill one can learn and perfect (I’m not sure the same is true for happiness). The ability to discover a level of joy in tasks you otherwise don’t prefer or even dread is widely powerful. It's worth saying that this joy we are talking about is no one else’s responsibility but your own. You need to work at it while also managing your expectations. Work will never be 100% pure joy (not even close).
No one derives happiness from doing the dishes. In fact, I would be happier if dirty dishes ceased to exist. But I can find joy in it, especially if I’m doing the dishes with my wife. After years of practicing mundane tasks like this together, I found something wonderful about the calm, happy coordination we achieved in the act of cleaning up after dinner. It’s like a dance for us and it reminds me of how in-tune we can be.
I’ll share another one. I hate doing research. I find it tedious, I usually put it off, rush through it, or try to delegate it. For me, research is all rabbit holes to fall down, dead ends, wasted time and mountains of questionable facts. Despite all of this drudgery, being proficient at research is important to me. Somehow along the way, I discovered that I got a kick out of making the occasional, tangental connection between the bits of knowledge I was sifting through. Often, I only got a small hit of joy from these discoveries -- just enough to make me raise an eyebrow or smile for a split second -- but that is all I need. This ultimately made me far less hobbled by my hatred for the act of research. Researching did not make me a happier person, nor should I expect it to. But I did learn to find some joy in it and that made me better at it.
Joy is fragile
Joy can be fragile. For instance people can take the joy out of things for you; usually without knowing it. Perhaps there are moments of joy in that weekly team meeting: the way the conversation rolls forward effortlessly, or how your mind builds on the ideas presented. This is just enough to help you lean into an otherwise taxing session. That is, unless Bob is there; then it’s like eye-surgery. Bob may be valuable, but somehow he also has the ability to chase away the parts that feel great. I admit this silently frustrates me, so I now try to recognize situations or people that that are joyless beyond rehabilitation. This is also a skill worth developing.
