The 3 Signs Something Will Bring You Joy | Kate Bowler
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What does the podcast define as true joy versus everyday happiness?
Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I don't know if joy is a super definable concept. Sort of one of those things like we know it when we see it. I think the problem is a lot of people see it as when everything's going amazing, when when every problem is solved, when you're doing fun stuff. The relationship's going great. Your health is great. The kids are behaving. When everything is calm and simple and wonderful. And there's nothing wrong with any of this, but I don't think that's exactly how the Stoics would define joy.
Because what we're talking about there is we're talking about pleasure, we're talking about happiness, we're talking about, I don't know, simplicity, maybe just pleasure. And they kind of depend on circumstances. For th for the Stoics it was like, could you experience joy? even when things weren't going your way, even when you weren't hitting green lights. For the the Stoics, joy was what we got from working with other human beings, from realizing our tellos, our purpose in life. And I want to say they believed we could we could experience joy anywhere at any time. Marx realized, remember joy, happiness It depends on the quality of our thoughts. That's why I think Kate Bowler is so interesting. She's had a um a rough go of it the last
Couple of years, she had this terminal cancer diagnosis where she's somehow still here. And she wrote this book called Joyful Anyway. Which I think is is actually getting to the essence. Of the Stoic take on it in a really interesting way. It's like, no, no, can you be joyful even when it doesn't make sense to other people, even when it's really hard? And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Not joy as forced positivity, not joy as pretending that everything's fine, but still somehow joy that's deeper and stranger and more durable. We're going to talk about the difference between happiness and joy. Whether you could be happy and joyful even while suffering, and some of the overlaps between stoicism and Christianity.
And you're really gonna like it. Kate is amazing. Her other book, Everything Happens for a Reason, is great. So is No Care for Human. And then this new one, Joyful Anyway, is fantastic. She's a four times New York Times bestselling author. She's won a bunch of awards for her podcast. She's a professor of religious history at Duke. And as I said, at 35, she was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And that experience shaped some of what we're going to talk about today. You can follow her on all platforms at Kate C Bowler. Check out her substack, Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. Check out her podcast. Let's get into it. I'm uh doing a bunch of dates for this Daily Stoic Live tour. Maybe you came and saw me on one of the previous ones.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does the podcast define as true joy versus everyday happiness?
0:00–5:09
2
How did the Stoics view joy and why is it different from modern ideas of happiness?
5:09–8:48
3
What are the three surprising signs that indicate something will bring you real joy?
8:48–12:52
4
How does gratitude (saying “thank you”) serve as a signal for future joy?
12:52–17:12
5
Why can joy coexist with stress, sadness, or suffering?
17:12–22:57
6
How can we cultivate a capacity to notice unexpected moments of joy?
22:57–29:00
7
What modern habits (like optimization and endless scrolling) drain our ability to feel joy?
29:00–31:05
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Daily Stoic
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