Summer Fridays: How to be more joyful (w/ Ingrid Fetell Lee) (re-release)

How to find and create Joy in your life -- what is joy? And what is its purpose in our lives? We talk with Ingrid about how to cultivate more joy in our daily lives, especially when we don't feel particularly in the headspace for joy, and about how our design choices can have a huge impact on the way we perceive joy in our environment. We also talk with her about her book Joyful and her TED talk. (This episode originally aired in 2025.) Vote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi there, Better Human listeners. Really quick, before we get to our episode, you would be doing me a huge favor and really helping out our show if you could take a moment to fill out our listener survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash B-H Survey 6. You can also find a link that you can just click directly on, which is in our show description. Wherever you're listening to this, look at the episode description and at the bottom, there's a link that you can click directly. Please tell us what is resonating with you, what you want more of, what you'd like to see changed, topics you would like to see covered. Your honest feedback means the world to us. It just takes a few seconds of your time and it would really help us to improve the show and have future seasons be even better. Thank you. It means a lot to me and to the team that

• 0:45Speaker 00

  makes the show. Thanks for listening and thanks for taking a few seconds to do the listener survey. Now, onto the episode. Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to How to Be a Better Human. This summer, we're doing something special. We're calling it Better Human Summer Fridays. And every Friday this summer, we are going to be dropping a special episode on the feed, pulled straight from the How to Be a Better Human archive. These are conversations that I loved and that our team loved. And we think a lot of you may have never heard, and we think they deserve another moment in the sun. So we're giving them that literal moment in the sun here in the summertime. This show has grown a lot over the years. So this is our way of making sure that if you found us recently, you're not missing out on one of the conversations that I am still thinking about, sometimes years later. And if you are a day one Better Human listener,

• 1:28Speaker 00

  well, first of all, thank you. Thanks for listening for all these years. And I hope that you will enjoy this trip back into our archive, back into some of the best conversations that we've had in the past. So let's get into it. Here's Better Human Summer Fridays.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I am your host, Chris Duffy. Bright copper kettles, warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things. Well, actually, those are not mine. You probably already know that those were Julie Andrews's favorite things from The Sound of Music. Now, if I was making my own list of my favorite things, it would be free snacks, big laughs, jumping in water, and friends visiting. Those are a few of my favorite things. And also, obviously, making terrible parody lyrics to classic songs. Look, everyone has a different list of what makes them happy. Everyone has a different source of joy. But I think that we all would love to have lives that featured joy more frequently and more intensely. But today's guest, the designer and author

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Ingrid Fetell-Lee, she's been studying what we can do to create the environment and settings that make joy most likely, both for ourselves and for others. She looks at the science behind things like polka dots, or curved walls, or bright colors. And Ingrid's journey to take joy seriously, it started with an unexpected moment while she was in design school, and she was about to get her first year-end review, which is this famously stressful moment when all of the professors look at your work and then give you their unfiltered opinions in person, to your face. And here's a clip from Ingrid's TED Talk where she talks about that.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  So it's my turn, and I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up. And I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy." Joy? I wanted to be a designer, because I wanted to solve real problems.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Joy is nice, I guess, but it's kind of light, not substantial. But I was also kind of intrigued, because joy is this intangible feeling. And how does that come from the stuff on the table next to me? I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?" They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said. I packed up my things for the summer, but I couldn't stop thinking about this question. And this launched a journey, one that I didn't know at the

• 4:24Speaker 01

  time would take me 10 years, to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call joy.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  We're going to hear all about Ingrid's joyful journey and what she's learned over the last decade in just a minute. But first, we are all going to experience the unique joy of podcast ads.

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• 5:32Speaker 00

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• 6:18Speaker 00

  We're talking today with Ingrid Fetell-Lee, the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I'm Ingrid Fetell-Lee. I am a designer and a researcher who studies the relationship between our emotions and our surroundings. I am the author of a book called Joyful, and I write a blog called The Aesthetics of Joy.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Ingrid, so let's get started with something that you actually mentioned right before we started this interview, which is, you said, "I'm not like 100% in the joyful headspace. It might take me a minute to get back into it." So I think that's a very relatable place for many people who are listening or watching this, is like, okay, I'm not like naturally in that space. How do you get back into joyful headspace, you know, part of your life?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's funny. So I was talking about how I am researching something new, and it's very heady. I'm very in my mind. And I think one of the things that always brings me back to joy is getting back into my body somehow. In this case, like, it literally, for me, was putting on like a colorful, something brightly colored, going for a quick walk, or jumping, like doing a few jumps in the air, like a kid would do, or spinning around, like some physical movement, I think, often helps to get me out of that rumination headspace, or you're worrying or thinking of our problems, and back into your joyful body.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  It's a joy to talk to you, partly because I've been a fan of your work for so long, and then have had the privilege and opportunity to get to know you a little bit, because you and my wife Molly work together. But something that Aesthetics of Joy, the blog that you wrote and continue to write, has made me think a lot about is the way in which these things, like putting on a colorful piece of clothing, or like, having polka dots in your house, or a bright color, that there are these ways that we can kind of like, structurally, put more joy into our lives. And I had never thought about it that way before I started reading your work.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, where do I begin with that? That's such a lovely thing to say. I remember, you know, as a kid, growing up, I always thought of joy as this thing that you stumble upon, you know, if you get lucky, you get a few moments of joy in a day, but you never really know where they're going to come from. And it wasn't until I became a designer, where I was actually, you know, learning to create things, something out of nothing, right? You know, you have an idea, and you actually literally turn it into physical matter, that I started to think about, could we actually create things that give this feeling of joy? And if we could, wouldn't that be amazing? Because it would take some of the pressure off having to do it for ourselves.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  If we can put more of it in our surroundings, then we have these repeatable chances to experience joy in our daily lives.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Before we go too much further, I think maybe we should just go back to square one and say, what is joy?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Right. So we often use the words joy and happiness interchangeably. There are so many words in our culture that we use for positive emotions, and yet they kind of all get mixed up. And I think it's, for me, it's most helpful to define joy in relationship to happiness, because those are the two that I think get most conflated. And so I'll start with happiness. Happiness is like a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It takes into account a range of different factors. So how we feel about our health and our work, whether we have a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, how connected we feel to other people. Whereas joy is much simpler and more immediate. So when psychologists use the word joy, what they generally mean is an intense momentary experience of positive emotion.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  And this is something that we can measure through direct physical expressions, things like smiling and laughter, feeling of wanting to jump up and down. You know, you watch a kid and if they're in a moment of joy, you know, because they don't mask it, they don't hide it. It's this very physical visceral feeling. And so to me, I think this is a really powerful distinction, because we spend a lot of our time pursuing happiness, you know, trying to figure out what is the precise combination of things to put into place in our lives that's going to create that perfect state of happiness, that kind of happily ever after from the fairy tales. And yet, these little moments of joy are happening all the time. They're always available to us. And when we start to gather them up, lots of

• 10:50Speaker 01

  positive changes start to happen in our lives.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Little kids are naturally so joyful. And you're very much an adult. But you're a joyful adult. So can you talk about how joy looks in adulthood and how we can bring it into this phase in our lives?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  I love that you brought this up, because I think this is such a deep cultural bias that we have, right? That joy is for children, or we associate it with childhood, and therefore it must be juvenile. And the idea that we can retain joy as we age throughout our whole lives, it often isn't modeled for us, right? So especially, I would say, for women, you know, a lot of women don't have a model of a mother figure or grandmother figure who took care of their own joy, who did things for themselves. What adult joy has become in our culture has often become equated with consumption for both genders. I think a lot

• 11:47Speaker 01

  of us have seen joy be pushed off to the sort of edges of our lives. And so to me, it's less about how do I bring joy into this phase of life? But how do I remember? That's actually my natural state. Just as the way it was when I was a kid, it's my natural state, and I'm just reacting to things. I'm letting go of some of the things that have taken that away from me.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  It feels like a lot of this comes from being a designer and you having a background in design. So kind of seeing how joy is created through curves, or through a window that's an unexpected shape, or through color, or through the design of an interaction or an event. I think of that as like a much nuanced, sophisticated view of joy. That's not just like, kids love bubbles, and that's great. But I think you kind of think about, but why? What is it about bubbles that we love?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  I think you're right. It is the designer's perspective. And I think what specifically it is, is that for a lot of us, when we think, oh, we're going to make something joyful, we think about what is joyful, and then we just do that. So it's like, oh, kindergarten is joyful. Okay, we're just going to put brightly colored bean bags everywhere, and we're just gonna, you know, put Legos everywhere and bubbles, and that's just going to make it joyful. And you're right, as part of my work, what I was trying to understand was what makes these things specifically joyful. And it's understanding that there are sensorial qualities to those joyful things that are repeatable, that we can find throughout cultures

• 13:22Speaker 01

  all over the planet. So things like bright color, round shapes, a sense of abundance and multiplicity, a feeling of lightness or elevation, repeating patterns. And it's that level of abstraction of being able to understand what is the essence that's actually making this joyful from a neuroscience perspective, that allows us to then say, okay, well, what's really doing the work of creating the joy is the repetition, not necessarily the polka dots. It's the repetition of the circular shape. And those two things together are what's creating that feeling of joy. And so we can apply that idea somewhere else, and it doesn't necessarily have to feel so, so literal.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  How does joy differ when we experience it physically versus when we are seeing it visually, or maybe even online? Like, there's something joyful about watching a video of a baby kitten playing. But there's also something joyful about jumping on a trampoline, or walking in a field of sunflowers. How are those different?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  What I would say is the level of sensory involvement, you know, the more senses we have involved, the more immersive an experience is going to be. And so actually, walking in the field of sunflowers, your brain is doing different things than when it's sort of witnessing that as a flat graphic on a screen. So I never want to say that, you know, you can't experience a high degree of joy through a digital interface, because of course, there are things that interfaces can do that other things can't. And so there are, for example, movements that you can do in interactive design that you might not be able to do in the real world. And so if you're able to see it and touch it at the

• 15:08Speaker 01

  same time and smell it, that's a different thing from just being able to see something.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Let's do a quick exercise. What are three things in the last week that have given you joy?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so mine, and they, you know, they're pretty mundane, but I think that's the nature of it, right? Is often we're finding joy in these like really mundane things. The first is, so my son has not been wanting to go to school. That's a very common thing. You know, they wake up and they want to stay home with you. They don't want to go to school. And so my husband had this, was talking to him about it. And he said, you know, why, why don't you want to go to school? And he said, I don't like the feeling of going to school. And so he thought about this, and he's like, well, how do we change the feeling of going to school? And I was thinking about like, am I, maybe I'm a little bit like to, like, get your shoes on, let's go in the mornings. I'm not in the joy mindset. So

• 16:00Speaker 01

  he started playing a different artist every morning in the car on the way to school. And he's way, and so I picked up the baton. And so I've been doing the, you know, all the drop offs. And every day, you know, we explore like a different musician, because we're like, almost 20 minutes in the car, to listen to a different artist from my childhood, my growing up. And that's been so, just watching him get so excited for like, what is the artist of the day and what we're going to pick? That has been a really joyful thing for me.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Oh, I love that.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  We can take this thing that we've sort of, we've settled into this kind of slump around, and we can actually turn that into something that's joyful. The second is just the sun coming out. It has been really gloomy, and we've had like, a couple of sunny days, and it has just been like, giving me so much life. And the third is, I've been planting. And so I've been back in the garden and planted, I got my foxgloves in early this year, and it was really, just really great feeling to be out in the sunshine, hands in the dirt.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  It's also interesting to note that just remembering and listing those three, I started smiling, you started smiling, there was kind of this second wave of joy of just remembering and re-experiencing a joyful thing.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. We don't do enough of what's called sabering. You know, there's a whole science of sabering, and there are lots of different ways to do it. But recounting joyful moments is one of the ways to extend and deepen our experiences of joy. And so telling someone about it, I think a lot of us are taught to sort of downplay our joy, either because we're afraid of seeming like we're bragging, we're afraid of seeming like we're silly, or frivolous, because we're sort of in this very cheerful, joyful state. So sometimes it can be helpful to over express, because our brains are sort of reading our bodily state. And when we do a happy dance, when we get a good email, or, you know, something

• 18:03Speaker 01

  like that, it sort of sends that biofeedback that you're in a joyful state, and it tends to sort of reinforce that idea of an upward spiral, where you're looking now for more joy, and you're more attuned to it.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Okay, please keep attuned to both your joy and to this show, because we're going to take another quick break for ads, but we will be right back.

• 18:38Speaker 00

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• 20:35Speaker 00

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons that we put off getting support. And for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning, too. I think there's lots of rules that are so familiar, maybe we don't even notice that we're following them, like always being there for everyone else, but not making time for yourself. You know, I'm just talking about things that I myself work on in therapy. It's worth asking, who taught me that? And would I actually expect that from someone that I care about? Maybe these are rules that you have made up in your own head and you can process with a therapist and figure it out. If you have been waiting

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  to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plans nationwide, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US, you can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/human to explore your payment options. That's betterhelp, H E L P, dot com slash human. And we are back with Ingrid Fattell-Lee, the author of the book Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. For this show, I've spoken to several people who are relationship experts, and they've always said some version of like

• 22:00Speaker 00

  celebrating the other person's wins and celebrating them is such a crucial and often overlooked part of relationships. And this kind of like over emphasizing and the sharing, right? Like whether it's a friend or a family member or a romantic partner, someone tells you something good, or you tell them something good, and then you both celebrate it together? That just feels so, that feels so good.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels good. And it's also really important. And I mean, there are all these like viral red flags posts going around or green flags, like maybe we'll say in the green flag, but like a green flag in a relationship is someone who will celebrate your good news with you and be in the psychological literature, they call it active constructive. So basically, like they are actively celebrating with you and they are like, you know, wanting to build on that. You know, you say, hey, like, I got this promotion and like the, they are just like so excited. They want to talk about it with you. They want to hear all about it. They want you to tell the story over and over again. Go out to dinner with someone else. Like, tell the story, tell the story, right? Like, that kind of encouragement is,

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I think, a really positive green flag in a relationship for the long-term success of that relationship.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  The other thing that this conversation has brought up for me is like, there's lots of things that I like about comedy. And there's reasons why I am a comedian and have made this the thing that I do for a job. One of the biggest ones is just this, not just license, but requirement to walk around the world looking for strange, hilarious, odd things that make me laugh.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Right. Well, so I call it, in my line of work, I call it joy spotting, this idea that you're attuning your senses to what's joyful in your surroundings and you're picking that stuff up, you're sort of collecting it, but you become kind of like this joy or humor collector, because you know, you have a responsibility to pass it on. Like, that's what you signed on for is to pass that on and to help other people laugh. And so you're looking for those things with a very generous eye, right? And I think you can do the same with things that bring you joy. It doesn't necessarily have to be something that is big or momentous. It can be literally like, I saw, I saw this car and it was your favorite color. I had to send it to you. They can be very, very trivial, but I think

• 24:18Speaker 01

  we forget, you know, what's great about joy and humor as well, is that they're just such great excuses to connect.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  What would you say to a person who is listening, who they've been hearing this, and they tried to do the exercise, three things that brought them joy in the last week, and they are saying, I got nothing. Nothing has brought me joy in the last week. It is hard to find joy. What would you say to them?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  I would say that that happens often. Actually, I do an exercise in my talks where I ask people to close their eyes and I give them prompts to sort of think of something that might have brought them joy recently. And so every talk, I often get people come up to me at the end and say, I got nothing. And should I be worried about that? Right? And I, it's not that there's anything wrong with you if you can't come up with something, right? We go through seasons of life where joy is hard to find. But we also sometimes fall out of the habit of it because we went through something hard and we've forgotten to put joy back into our lives, or we've forgotten that we're entitled to joy, right?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  And we know that everything that gives us joy, we will lose eventually. So not to be morbid, but joy is not forever. So if you've experienced that loss, you may, you may struggle to find it. And to me, the simplest thing is just starting this practice of joy spotting or noticing joy around you, or trying to pay attention when it just comes over you. Catch yourself smiling, right? Be the observer who catches yourself smiling or catches yourself laughing and notice what's happening in, in those circumstances. And then you can start to work on creating more of those moments. So I think it can be done in a very low pressure

• 26:06Speaker 01

  way. But I think it's, it's a signal and it's nothing more than that. And the last thing I'll say on this is just really remembering that joy is in there and it is, it is your natural state. There is a piece of you that still remembers it. So, and it will feel very familiar when it starts to come back.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  I'm also curious if part of the reason why joy is going to come and go and, and not be all the time, has to do with the definition that you gave, this idea that it is intense. And that if it was like, if you feel this feeling 20 hours of the day, I don't think we would call it intense anymore. That would just be your standard feeling. Is there some part of the fleetingness that is also what makes it special?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I'm really glad you asked this because it's, it gets at the evolutionary purpose of joy. So we often think of joy as just this nice thing that we have and doesn't really have a purpose. And for many decades in psychology, that was sort of how it was treated, because it really wasn't a ton of interest in positive emotions. And so positive emotions were just kind of like this extra and everything was focused on the pathologies, right? And on the mental illness and how do we, you know, remedy mental illness? And no one was really thinking about joy. It was just a thing that was like this evolutionary nice to have. And then when psychologists started to dig into it, they realized that like, nothing is universal in human nature without a purpose, right? Nothing evolved in everyone. If we,

• 27:35Speaker 01

  if we take, and Darwin, you know, was the first to identify that emotions are evolved, that they actually, you know, are part of our DNA, they're passed down and there are seven universal emotions. So if joy is one of those seven universal emotions that is consistent in all humans, then why do we have it? And the sort of consensus that emerged is that joy evolved to move us toward things that would be beneficial for our survival and our, and the thriving of the species, right? And so when we see things that bring us joy, they're signs of what can help us thrive. And so joy is one of the things that rewards us when we found things that can help us survive and thrive. And so that's

• 28:18Speaker 01

  why it is an inconsistent state. We evolved that way for it to be an inconsistent state. And yet we can create more, we can tap into that circuitry to create more of these moments of joy.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  People, I think, sometimes feel a sense of like guilt or like joy is improper in some situations, especially when.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Things are bad or dangerous or troubling when it feels like that in the world or in your narrow, personal life. And I'm curious to get your take on that because I can see the argument of like, sometimes joy is inappropriate. And I can also see the argument of actually joy is never inappropriate.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, I'm going to fall into the joy is never inappropriate bucket. I mean, I remember after my grandmother passed, my cousin and I were driving through the cemetery after the burial. And there was a car that was just like covered in flowers. And there was a giant picture of the deceased. It was someone else, you know, and just covered in flowers. And it had this very festive look to it. And it was not our grandmother at all. And we both just saw it and we burst out laughing. And we said, and he just said, that is so not Nana. And we both just were laughing so hard at this, you know? And it was this moment of, of release and relief that we were, in a way, we were celebrating her. We were laughing and we were grieving at the same time.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  If you believe that it's wrong to feel joy when someone, somewhere, anywhere is suffering, then it would never be appropriate to feel joy. The thing that I've come to is that suppressing your own joy doesn't give it to anyone else. Like, taking joy from yourself doesn't suddenly magically give joy to someone else. And so I think we can be mindful of our impact on others. We can be mindful of the way our consumption affects others and certainly work to not increase suffering in the world. But the idea that we should dampen our joy so that we feel less guilty about it, I think that guilt is misplaced in a lot of situations. And what we should be doing is both dialing up our joy and dialing up our engagement

• 30:27Speaker 01

  or our action in trying to mitigate some of those situations. Instead of just feeling paralyzed and doom scrolling and saying, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm just gonna not feel joy, but I'm also just gonna like vicariously consume suffering. I think that doesn't necessarily help anyone.

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Something it also makes me think about is, in my personal experience, often people who are doing the on the ground work to address some of the most serious, least joyful problems are really joyful themselves. And I don't think that they see it as a contradiction. I'm thinking like, when I worked at a, a, a school that was, you know, had a lot of kids in, in really tough situations, experiencing all sorts of different adverse experiences. Those teachers were so joyful and so full of jokes and fun. And it wasn't that they were ignoring the hard part. It was just like, yeah, you can have both. In fact, the only way that you don't immediately burn out is if you also experience joy.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  And, you know, it's something that I think, I bet you people listening will relate to. So I think the like, the weight of what you're dealing with and the level of joy are in some ways, almost like inversely proportional, not, they're not one to one.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. And maybe what we're really feeling when we feel guilty about joy is actually it's guilt about our inaction or our sense of detachment from the problem and not necessarily actually the joy.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  And also, just to be clear, you can be a corporate accountant and be full of joy. I'm just saying, in my experience, like, the places where you wouldn't expect it are often full of it. And the places where you might think like, there's no reason they wouldn't be joyful, they're not as joyful, or they don't necessarily have to be joyful.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  I love that example. And again, nothing against corporate accountants. I know joyful accountants.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  But I think the point stands that it, really, this idea that joy can thrive even in the most unexpected places because these are places that experience extreme hardship. And yet, joy can be alive and well in those places.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  What are some of the things that you've found have most resonated with people? People have been able to put into place in their own life to, to bring some more joy into it.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  That's a big question.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Okay. One thing that seems to immediately resonate with people is color. This idea that having more color in our surroundings can create joy in a repeatable way, I think really tends to click for people, especially because, you know, we, many of us are working in offices that are gray and beige. We come home to homes that are kind of white and beige. These neutrals have sort of taken hold, and we don't really know why they've taken hold. Maybe it's the, you know, the minimalist trend or the, the kinfolk period in the early 2000s. And, and so we have this very bland canvas.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  And I think people go and they're like, yeah, why don't I have more color in my life? And then they put a little into their homes, you know, they paint a couple of walls or they buy something colorful that they have been eyeing, but sort of thought maybe wasn't sophisticated enough or wasn't for them. And they bring it home and like, even if it's like a colorful coffee mug, it's like something so small and simple. Or they start wearing more color. For a lot of people, they just started to look at their surroundings in a different way. That was my hope for the book, that people would start to look at their surroundings in a different way. Of course, I'm also really excited when people who are involved in spaces in the communities start to look at their spaces in a different way.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Teachers, when they start to look at the school environment. I've had lots of teachers write about projects that they've done with students to create more joy in the school building, or the crosswalks, or the playground, or, you know, the areas around the school, or nurses working in hospitals, or hospital administrators. And I recently heard that the organization Freedom Reads is looking at joyful in the context of prison libraries and starting to bring aesthetics of joy into these spaces, which are of course constructed in such a deliberately depressing and dehumanizing

• 34:47Speaker 01

  way to actually inspire people and create a space for wellbeing and rehabilitation for people who are incarcerated. And that, to me, is significant because it's a place that has been so overlooked for so long. Those are the kinds of things that make me excited, both when people are doing it for themselves, but then people are also doing it for others.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  I'm glad you brought up the other focus because I think that many people can think about joy as an individual inward looking piece. And something that I think is one of my big takeaways from joyful is that building community, taking care of nature and the environment, thinking about society, that there's a real role for joy in those places. It's not just a, my individual experience of my day to day. I think that's a really powerful and different way of thinking about joy, for me at least.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Can you say more?

• 35:46Speaker 00

  If you were to say, like, describe joy, all of the examples that I would have given you, you said, give me 20 examples of joy. I would have given you individual, or maybe at most, family and friend examples. And it's just not how I, I had, would have thought of it in a much more individual way before I read your book.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Right. It, I think we have a very individualistic society, right? So we tend to concentrate our efforts toward joy in the private realm and not in the communal realm. And the result of that is that our common spaces often, when we even have them, right? They lack joy. So like, you go to Europe and you have these beautiful common spaces and piazzas and places where people gather. And, you know, we lack a lot of those in the US. But even when we do have them, they tend to be focused on commercialism and economic activity rather than on the creation of joy. And so viewing those spaces through the lens of joy, I think, is a, we can suddenly see what's missing.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  That the color and, you know, these round shapes, these welcoming shapes, and some of these other elements are things that, that draw people in. They bring people together. You can see that with public art. When public art is done in a really joyful way, people gravitate toward it. And then it gives them opportunities to interact with each other and it creates a true public experience. So I'm all for the reintroduction, the reinfusion of joy into our public spaces because I think it's part of what we're trying to achieve in terms of reinvigorating our communal rituals and our communal life.

• 37:23Speaker 00

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• 40:18Speaker 00

  It also, the idea of like, we can communally create these moments, makes me think of two places I've lived have done that I thought were really joyful. One is when I lived in Somerville, Massachusetts, they had, and I think actually I've learned that this exists in many other places, but they had a day in the summer each year where they did, it was called Porch Fest, and it was just totally amateur bands, but people would come out and they would play music on their porch. And pretty much anywhere you walked for, you know, 10-block radius, you'd be able to hear a bunch of different concerts of people who are wildly different levels of ability. And it was just so fun to be like, that's a middle-aged woman playing an accordion, and then I go two blocks over and it's hard rock, and then I go two blocks over and it's a classical violinist.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  It's just like, the joy of experiencing that and seeing all of your neighbors have this amazing ability to do something was so incredible. And then a much lower lift one is now, living in Los Angeles, something that gives me such joy and is really fun and makes me feel connected to the place is, in a neighborhood close by, they have a thing every month where it's just people who have too much of something in their garden. They get together and it's a half hour where you swap it. So it's like, I have a bucket of lemons, you have a bucket of oranges, we're gonna put them on the table, and everyone can take what they want until it's gone, and everyone gets a little sample of whatever is in other people's gardens. And it is so joyful.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I love that. I, it's funny, when you first were explaining that, I was thinking it was gonna be plants.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  As a gardener, I was like, oh, I was like, oh, it's like, I have too many of these, and I'm gonna divide them and bring the bulbs. I love that. I mean, there's so many organic ways to connect. I was thinking about, actually, a friend of mine was telling me that I had a birthday, little birthday celebration recently, and we were lamenting how rare it is that we have reasons to get together. I think a lot of celebration went away, right? And my friend Laura was telling me that a friend of hers, growing up, her parents had a party every year after, the day after Thanksgiving, and it was a leftover pie party. And everyone brought whatever leftover pie they had, and everyone got to taste everyone else's leftover pies. And it's like, you show up to someone's house with like, half a pie, right?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  But it's like, the perfect thing, because everyone's sick of their own pie, everyone wants to try someone else's pie, and it keeps the celebration going. I love that. So I think there are all sorts of things, reasons to gather, reasons to be together, that are very joyful and are low lift like that.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Because we're on the leftover pie party. I have to say that the comedian Chris Gethard, for years, maybe a decade at this point, has hosted a show party thing the night before Thanksgiving, when it's like, nobody wants to cook. And so it's called Sandwich Night, and you just bring and eat sandwiches or make sandwiches together. And I'm like, that's a perfect three days right there. Sandwich night, Thanksgiving itself, then leftover pie night.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  Leftover pie party.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  That's a leftover pie party. That's, that's a great trio of days.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  We've solved it.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I want to ask you one thing that I'm just personally curious about. I have a hunch what your answer is, but I'm curious. You are the author of a book called Joyful. You run courses for people about finding joy, about decorating with joy, about living with joy. You're very associated with the idea of joy. Does that ever feel limiting, or pressured, or stifling for you to experience all of the other emotions? Do you ever feel like pressure to be joyful when you're not joyful all the time?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it's a pressure to feel joyful when I'm not. I have a lot of gratitude for having chosen this lens on the world, because I feel, I mean, if you're gonna devote 15 years to studying something, you might as well devote it to studying something that is gonna enhance your life. And I have learned so much from this work that has enhanced my own life, has increased my own ability to feel joy, that has made it more stable of a practice or an experience in my life. And so, and part of that is because, again, I don't expect joy to last. So I know that there are gonna be crappy days, and my job on the crappy days is not

• 44:30Speaker 01

  to force myself to feel joy or put on a happy face. It is to feel the other feelings and stay available to joy, to recognize that joy can still, you know, I think the way that I used to think about it was, oh, I'm having a bad day, I just have to get through this bad day, and then I will, you know, maybe tomorrow will be a better day. Now, my mindset is more, oh, this is really a bad day, and there might be one joyful thing in this day. One day, I might not remember all of the stuff that was so hard today, but I might remember that. And so I'm just gonna stay available to the possibility of it. It's enriched my life, and I wouldn't say that it has inhibited my ability to feel

• 45:14Speaker 01

  other emotions, because I feel all of them. Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Amazing. Ingrid, this has been such a delight to talk to you. I am always and forever a fan of your work, and I'm really glad that you made the time to be on the show. It was truly a delight.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Oh, likewise. It was really fun. Thank you so much for having me.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Ingrid Fetell-Lee. You can find out more about her work, her writing, her courses, and you can even take a free quiz about joy on her website, aestheticsofjoy.com. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects, at chrisduffeycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team who truly give me so much joy. On the TED side, we have got Joy Incarnate, Daniela Balarezzo, Banban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sunmanivong, Antonia Lei, and Joseph DeBryin. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who rejoice in the joy

• 46:17Speaker 00

  of the truth. On the PRX side, they are joyful both aesthetically and personally: Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Please share this episode with someone who brings joy into your life. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thank you for listening. This episode is sponsored by Kohler Smart Toilets. The objects we interact with most are often the ones we notice least. Kohler Smart Toilet challenges that assumption. What if the most overlooked space in your home could become the most considered? Their Vale Smart Toilet is a sculptural silhouette that isn't just intentional.

• 47:02Speaker 00

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