Appreciating Joy

Marcello Spinella, Ph.D.Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

The playing field isn’t level. Research shows that, all things considered, negative emotions havean unfair advantage over us, grabbing and holding our attention more easily. We spend much of our timehandling problems and figure that happiness will pop up on its own when the time is right. Our inherentputting­out­fires approach to life works well for certain crises, but the problem is that it leads to a veryimbalanced life in the long run. According to Socrates, the unexamined life (i.e. the one lived onauto­pilot) is not worth living.

One of the fundamental problems we experience as humans is that we think that what weexperience is the way things actually are. But it can’t be. The only way we know about reality is whatgets filtered in through our senses. Our eyes, ears, nose, etc. send electrical signals to the brain, which inturn takes those signals and constructs a version of reality, something like a virtual reality simulation.Most of the time, this working model of reality is good enough. It lets us get around and function.Sometimes, like when someone takes LSD or has schizophrenia, our version of reality is terribly off. Butwhat most of us don’t realize is that even our normal, everyday model of reality is also off, just to alesser degree. Given that negative emotions have a stronger pull than positive ones, that little oversightcan turn into big trouble.

The eminent psychologist William James was well aware of this. He wrote that “Whilst part ofwhat we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, another part (and it may be thelarger part) always comes out of our own mind.” He further noted that “each of us literally chooses, byhis ways of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.” It’s not thatwe passively experience reality so much as we actively construct it. We make choices in what wenotice, dwell on, evaluate, and interpret. As the writer Kahlil Gibran pointed out, “We choose our joysand sorrows long before we experience them.”

One of the wiser choices we can make in assembling our version of reality is to appreciate joy,that of others as well as ourselves. In Buddhist practice, this is called mudita, meaning happiness inresponse to a person’s happiness, success, or good fortune. This is a genuine feeling of happiness, notone that is forced.

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“Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takesjoy, even as though t'were his own.”

­­Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When considering other’s happiness and good fortune, we are faced with a choice. Onecommon response is jealousy and envy. “I wish I had that, instead of them.” We all know this becausewe’ve all felt it. While it’s natural for people to feel this at times, dwelling on it is not inevitable. Whenjealousy arises, we have a few options. One is to feed into it, rehearse all the reasons why we think theother doesn’t deserve success, or why we deserve it more. Envy is an unpleasant feeling, and thisreaction only deepens the wound.

Another possibility is to chastise and punish ourselves for having an “unacceptable” emotion.This is like squirting lemon juice in the wound. Denial is another possibility, pretending the wounddoesn’t exist, while it continues to affect us on some level. None of these options are very appealing.Another choice is to re­frame the circumstances. Acknowledging the feeling openly and honestly, wecan recognize that one person’s success or happiness need not diminish another’s. It’s not like there’s atank of happiness somewhere and once it’s used up by the happy misers the rest of us are out of luck.

Our quick and automatic response is often to compare ourselves to others. A psychologistnamed Frank Fujita found that how often we compare ourselves with others relates to greater negativeemotion (more fear, anger, shame, and sadness), while it does not lead to any greater long­term positiveemotion. Comparison, it seems, is not a pathway to long­term happiness.

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So rather than wallowing in the quagmire of who has more and better (More of what? Andbetter according to whom?), we can shift to the simple strategy of feeling happy for another’s happiness.William Shakespeare said that “joy delights in joy,” and a Swedish proverb says that “shared joy is adouble joy.” A Buddhist sutra points out that, “a single lamp may light hundreds of thousands of lampswithout itself being diminished.”

Given the choice between sympathetically rejoicing in another’s happiness, thereby increasingyour own happiness, or dwelling in envy and anger, diminishing your own happiness, which will youchoose? Appreciative joy is the closest we will get to a free lunch. As the Dalai Lama has said, whenwe feel happiness in response to another’s happiness, our odds of being happy go up by about 6 billionto one. The Buddhist monk Nyanaponika Thera said, “your life will gain in joy by sharing the happinessof others as if it were yours.”

However, appreciating joy is not limited to appreciating the joy of others. We can also feel joyin response to our own joy. We may feel happy about some circumstance, and then feel happy aboutfeeling happy, the exact same way we would feel happy for someone else. Why not get the most out ofit?

Feeling joy nourishes us, and gives us more reserves to deal with difficulties when they comealong. Besides, in experiencing our own joy, we in turn radiate that towards others as we interact withthem, making a contagious and virtuous cycle. As Washington Irving put it: “How easy it is for onebenevolent being to diffuse pleasure around him; and how truly is a kind heart a fountain of gladness,making everything in its vicinity to freshen into smiles!”

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ReferencesBaumeister, R.F., et al. (2001). Bad is stronger than good. Review of General Psychology, 5, 323­370.Fujita, Frank (2008). The frequency of social comparison and its relation to subjective well­being. In The science of

subjective well­being, Eid, M. (ed.); Larsen, R.J. (ed.). pp. 239­257. New York: Guilford Press.Goethe, J.W. quoted in Hoyt, J.K. & Roberts, K.L., eds. (1940). Hoyt's New cyclopedia of practical quotations drawn

from the speech and literature of all nations. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company.Gibran, K. (1926). Sand and foam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Irving, W. (1819). The christmas dinner, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. New York: C.S. Van Winkle.James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt & Company.Hammer, J. (2006). Midrash Numbers Rabbah 15:19, The Jewish book of days. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication

Society.Plato. Apology. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.http :// classics . mit . edu / Plato / apology . htmlShakespeare, W. (1916). Sonnet #8, in The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary. (R.

Alden, ed.) Boston: Houghton­Mifflin. (Original work from 1609).Stone, J.R., ed. (2006). The Routledge book of world proverbs. New York: Routledge.Thera, N. (1958). The four sublime states. The Wheel, No. 6. Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society.Thurman, R.A.F. (1976). The holy teaching of Vimalakirti: Mahayana scripture. University Park, PA: Penn State

University Press.Photo Credits: Fun In The Fountain by Malia Autio

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