At age 35, Kate Bowler was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer. Her new book, “Joyful, Anyway,” reflects on what it means to find delight and gratitude in the face of uncertainty, pain and ordinary struggles.
Drawing on her own experience with illness, the stories of others and her background as an educator and historian, Bowler explores what she calls “the ache” — the persistent sense of longing and incompleteness that comes with being human. Joy is not a cure for the ache, she writes, but something that can — and should — coexist alongside.
Bowler, now 45 and a history professor at Duke University, sat down with The Washington Post to discuss how to look for signs of joy, even during the hardest times. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)
You write about how chasing happiness often means missing out on joy. How do you define joy and happiness, and how do they differ? Does each have a unique purpose in our lives?
Happiness from a psychological perspective is a sense of ease. It’s lovely. It feels like small, accumulated things that go your way. It’s very relaxing. Joy, on the other hand, is not relaxing. It’s a bright, enlivening feeling. It makes you feel awake. You can’t be happy and sad at the same time, but you can be joyful and sad at the same time, which is a very neat trick.
We have confused happiness with mental health. In a culture that only prioritizes good, positive emotions and tries to crowd all experiences onto one end of the emotional spectrum, what we have is people who have pathologized sadness and they don’t feel like winners in life. That kind of toxic positivity has become so mainstream. It’s nuts that we decided that happy was the default option.
I believe in happiness, and I think people can have whole seasons of it and it’s wonderful. We can structure our lives to be happier, but the idea that you can create a permanent state of happiness actually creates misery.
After facing a devastating diagnosis and years of health challenges, how has your understanding of joy changed?
I have been strangely rescued by joy in the most unusual moments of my life, including a terrible stretch in a hospital bed where I wasn’t sure I was going to live through the summer.
I didn’t want to be joyful — I just found out I had Stage 4 cancer. I was full of rage, I was heartbroken, and I wasn’t trying at all. Joy is something that can happen when you’re not trying at all. I love knowing that it is the oxygen we will be given when we’re not even trying to breathe.
I felt it for absolutely no reason but God’s love in the hospital right after my diagnosis. I felt it in Pakistan a few months ago when I was paragliding and I realized that I had lived long enough to feel truly lucky. I feel it when I hear my dad talking with my son in the next room over FaceTime.
You write that moments of joy often appear when life is hardest — during times of loss, grief and uncertainty. What helps people to recognize joy in the middle of hardship?
Look for signs of gratitude; look for moments where our hearts say, “Thank you.” We can also look for delight. What is so funny about joy as a mandate is it’s not generic. My delight is absurdity; other people love rainbows. The other piece is: Joy will feel a lot like hope. It will shout down despair, and it will remind us, when we thought it could never come again, that something beautiful is happening and it will happen again.
You write that the “terrible genius” of toxic positivity is that it stops us from acknowledging what we’ve lost. How does that mindset actually undermine resilience and our ability to experience real joy?
It is a horrific irony that the front of positivity is almost guaranteed to make us sad. It will, first of all, prevent the kind of honesty that allows us to name emotions and experiences as they happen. It will strip away that first layer of recognition that we all need in our hearts and souls to be able to say what is painful, what is sad and what shouldn’t be. And then it forces everybody to almost immediately metabolize that and “reframe” it into some kind of lesson.
This is a culture obsessed with lessons — there are no setbacks, just setups. The speed with which someone will try to tell you that your suffering is a gift is: 3, 2, 1. When are we allowed to say in our lives we will likely lose more than we gain?
We need to accept reality in order to do the harder work of love, of courage. I’ve come to realize that for everybody, life takes so much more courage than we thought it would. In our very brittle happiness culture, we don’t give people the credit they deserve for facing the lives that we have. I just want to allow us a minute for grief, for reality, for lament, for appropriate bitterness.
You describe “the ache” as a universal human longing for more. What does the ache reveal about what it means to be human, and how can acknowledging it lead to more joyful and fulfilling lives?
The ache is a reminder that every beautiful thing is here in a minute and may be gone in the next; the fleeting nature of our lives will always make us hunger, and our hunger can either then be manipulated and distorted to force us to buy enormous water bottles and comfortable jumpsuits on Instagram, or we can remind ourselves that the feeling that it’s never enough isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s part of the engine.
Now that I know it’s part of the engine, I can also use moments of joy to say “it’s enough.” The ache is the way we’re born and the way we’ll die. Our hunger is what gives us this incredible capacity to love and to want and to try in a world that will demand more of us than we want to give. We just have to treat the ache like an arrow, and to be able to have more frankness that our hunger won’t always be satisfied. I think the better answer than just “run after whatever you want” is to be more alive to these soul-filling moments of joy as the gift that they are.
No matter who we are, who we have to take care of, no matter how stuck we might feel, we must expect true moments of fulfillment where we are. Joy is for us, too, not just for the lucky people.
You write about “putting yourself in the way” of joy. What are some small ways people can do that in everyday life?
You have to treat it like homework. I think there are things we can do to have more capacity for joy, and I included some good advice from Immanuel Kant in the book:
Find something to do, because there’s a very intimate relationship between joy and service. When I get stuck in my own life, sometimes going and being useful to someone else is the most joyful thing I can do.
Find someone to love. Because love gives us an assignment.
And then, he says, find something to hope for. Despair is going to be the loudest voice in the room most of the time and believing in joy will remind us that no matter what the headline is, it can find us.
If someone reading this feels consumed by the ache, or they feel like life is particularly heavy right now, what would you want them to know about the possibility of joy?
I want everyone to know that joy is not going to skip them. Joy is not going to knock on somebody else’s door and never circle back. There is joy in the ups and the downs, and it helps our ability not just to survive our lives, but to love them. To love our lives is to believe in our inherent worthiness; that joy is for us, that we were made with this incredible capacity for it.
The worst times won’t be permanent and neither will the best times, but there will be soul-filling, life-changing, everything-is-gorgeous moments in the middle and we can come to expect them, and we can believe they will carry us. It’s one of the few things that we can actually promise each other: We will be carried by the beauty of joy.
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