Happiness is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. Joy and happiness often get used interchangeably, but you feel they’re unique to one another. It has a connection to our lives in our evolutionary history. We’re not necessarily going to eat a brightly colored car or painted wall, but those things still give us that pop of joy because they tap into ancient circuits. It led us to be more likely to survive and thrive because there was energy there to be found.

It makes sense that over thousands of generations in evolution, we’re continued to be attracted to bright colors. It seems random that we’re attracted to bright colors, but our color vision evolved in part to help our primate ancestors find the ripe fruit and young leaves in the treetop canopy. We evolved to move toward the things that would most likely aid our survival and thriving. I started to discover that the reason we’re attracted to these things isn’t by chance. That turned into a much deeper exploration for me. We can’t agree on politics, but we can agree on bubbles.

If you blow bubbles and you watch how babies react, it’s always with this joy and wonder. In essence, there’s a deeper reason why we’re biologically driven to seek joy. In your Ted talk, you say that the drive toward joy is the drive toward life. “We can cultivate it in our daily lives.” Once we understand this, she says, we don’t have to wait for joy to find us. We just need to bear greater witness to the beautiful, bright, giggly, fluffy moments around us. Through her design work, writing, and website The Aesthetics of Joy, she helps us see that we all hold the power to experience more joy. It’s “not limited to a gender, ethnicity, or age.” Things like bouncy puppies and marigold sunsets evoke joy across the globe.įetell Lee’s epiphanies inspired her mission today. She began exploring joy: What creates it? How do you feel it? Where is it? Poring over research and anecdotal insights, Fetell Lee noticed reoccurring qualities-from a sense of abundance to feelings of lightness “when you’re lifted in a hot air balloon or gazing up at the clouds”- evoked from experiencing certain things. “I thought that was weird,” she tells me about the comment. While in design school, a professor casually said that Fetell Lee’s work offered a sense of joy. The truth is, Fetell Lee learned how to cultivate joy as an adult. Almost like she holds magical receptors that attract it like lightning. To experience Fetell Lee’s work, including reading her uplifting book Joyful and watching her Ted Talk (which has more than 17 million views ), is to assume she was born with a superhuman ability to feel endless joy. But then it goes away, and you wait for it to come again.” “It was a bit like luck: If you get some, great. “I used to think of joy as this ephemeral, fleeting feeling,” says the joy expert, designer, and author. Ingrid Fetell Lee admits joy was once elusive to her.

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