Summer Fridays: How to be more joyful (w/ Ingrid Fetell Lee) (re-release)
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What is Better Human Summer Fridays and why is this episode being re-released?
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, 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. 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' 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 Ingrid Fetel 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.
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. 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 time would take me 10 years to understand the relationship between the physical world and the mysterious, quixotic emotion we call joy.
We're gonna 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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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is Better Human Summer Fridays and why is this episode being re-released?
0:00–7:50
2
Who is Ingrid Fetell Lee and what prompted her decade-long study of joy?
7:50–25:22
3
How can I get back into a joyful headspace when I’m feeling stuck?
25:22–38:15
4
How does Ingrid define joy versus happiness and why does that matter?
38:15–40:04
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from How to Be a Better Human
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