Joy is Back! Here’s How to Find Yours.

After several years of sadness, anxiety, isolation, fear and anger, joy just resurged. It’s infectious. It’s contagious. And it’s available to everyone.

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Image: Pexels/Andrea Piacquadio

The American zeitgeist these past few years hasn’t exactly been conducive to the cultivation and spread of joy. An insidious cultural virus, thriving on negativity, acrimony and cynicism, created what history may deem a Dark Age of Dread, The symptoms: moderate to severe sadness, anxiety, isolation, fear and anger.

There was no room for joy. Or perhaps we just stopped looking for it. Whatever the case, the underlying theme of joy at the Democratic National Convention—whether you watched it or not, whether you agreed with what was behind it or not—unleashed a contagion of joy among the attendees.

And that got me wondering:

What is joy, really? What fuels it? Where did it go these past years? How could it make such a sudden and raucous comeback? And can we all maybe have some?

I’m pleased to report that once you understand what joy is and how it works — and regardless of your political persuasions — you just might find it infinitely accessible and wildly contagious.

“Joy isn’t hard to find at all,” the designer Ingrid Fetell Lee writes in her book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. “In fact, it’s all around us.”

I’ll explain Lee’s seemingly simplistic reasoning. But first, let’s be real: