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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Cherry blossoms and rainbows, bubbles and googly eyes. Why do some things seem to create such universal joy?
I know what joy feels like, but what is it exactly? And I found that... Even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words joy and happiness and positivity more or less interchangeably.
That's designer and author Ingrid Vettel Lee from her captivating talk from 2018, which we're excited to share again here today.
I started asking everyone I knew and even people I just met on the street about the things that brought them joy. It was, hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?
Chapter 2: What universal elements evoke joy according to Ingrid Fetell Lee?
Through the story of this detective work, Ingrid reveals what she learned about the surprisingly tangible roots of joy and shows how we can all find and create more of it in the world around us. That's coming up right after a short break.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Ingrid share about the definition of joy?
Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. And now, our TED Talk of the day.
It's 2008, and I'm just finishing my first year of design school. And I'm at my first year-end review, which is ... a form of ritual torture for design students, where they make you take everything you made over the course of the year and lay it out on a table and stand next to it, while a bunch of professors, most of whom you've never seen before, give you their unfiltered opinions of it.
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. And what I discovered is that not only are they linked, but that the physical world can be a powerful resource to us in creating happier, healthier lives.
After my review, I thought, I know what joy feels like, but what is it exactly?
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Chapter 4: How did Ingrid's journey into understanding joy begin?
And I found that even scientists don't always agree, and they sometimes use the words joy and happiness and positivity more or less interchangeably. But broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion, one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down. And this is actually a technical thing.
That feeling of wanting to jump up and down is one of the ways that scientists measure joy. It's different than happiness, which measures how good we feel over time. Joy is about feeling good in the moment, right now. And this was interesting to me because as a culture, we are obsessed with the pursuit of happiness, and yet in the process, we kind of overlook joy.
So this got me thinking, where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew and even people I just met on the street about the things that brought them joy.
Chapter 5: What tangible roots of joy did Ingrid discover through her research?
On the subway, in a cafe, on an airplane, it was, Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy? I felt like a detective. I was like, when did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it? I was the Nancy Drew of joy. And after a few months of this, I noticed that there were certain things that started to come up again and again and again.
They were things like cherry blossoms and bubbles, swimming pools and tree houses, hot air balloons and googly eyes and ice cream cones, especially the ones with the sprinkles. These things seem to cut across lines of age and gender and ethnicity. I mean, if you think about it, we all stop and turn our heads to the sky when the multicolored arc of a rainbow streaks across it. And fireworks.
We don't even need to know what they're for, and we feel like we're celebrating, too. These things aren't joyful for just a few people. They're joyful for nearly everyone. They're universally joyful. And seeing them all together, it gave me this indescribably hopeful feeling.
The sharply divided, politically polarized world we live in sometimes has the effect of making our differences feel so vast as to be insurmountable. And yet underneath it all, there's a part of each of us that finds joy in the same things.
And though we're often told that these are just passing pleasures, in fact, they're really important, because they remind us of the shared humanity we find in our common experience of the physical world. But I still needed to know, what is it about these things that makes them so joyful? I had pictures of them up on my studio wall, and every day I would come in and try to make sense of it.
And then one day, something just clicked. I saw all these patterns. Round things, pops of bright color, symmetrical shapes, a sense of abundance and multiplicity, a feeling of lightness or elevation. When I saw it this way, I realized that the feeling of joy is mysterious and elusive.
We can access it through tangible, physical attributes, or what designers call aesthetics, a word that comes from the same root as the Greek word eisenomai, which means, I feel, I sense, I perceive. And since these patterns were telling me that joy begins with the senses, I began calling them aesthetics of joy, the sensations of joy.
And in the wake of this discovery, I noticed something, that as I walked around, I began spotting little moments of joy everywhere I went. A vintage yellow car or a clever piece of street art. It was like I had a pair of rose-colored glasses. And now that I knew what to look for, I was seeing it everywhere. It was like these little moments of joy were hidden in plain sight.
And at the same time, I had another realization, that if these are the things that bring us joy, then why does so much of the world look like this? Why do we go to work here? Why do we send our kids to schools that look like this?
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