You Must Opt-In To Joy and Enjoyment

The First Lesson I'm Bringing into 33

3 Lessons for 33: You Must Opt-In To Joy and Enjoyment

I started carrying around a mini-notebook in my handbag. It’s a light lavender purple and was a gift from a friend on my last birthday. When I first got it, I had no idea what I’d use it for. Initially, I plopped it into my handbag, thinking I’d use it to jot down ideas for writing projects as they hit me in my day-to-day, but I carried it for a year, and it never happened. This year, it found its purpose.

Finding Joy in Paradise Lost

I think we’re way too passive about joy and enjoyment. Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I think this really is so for many of us. It seems we believe moments of joy and pleasure are simply facets of life that come and go, ebb and flow, and are simply seasonal. But I have learned that joy and enjoyment are experiences we have to actively choose and train ourselves to even notice. Now, this isn’t an endorsement of hedonism- the unrelenting and unconstrained pursuit of pleasure- it's a call to live intentionally in a broken world and to respond to how our brains are wired.

We were made for joy everlasting, created to dwell in Eden, walking with God as stewards of an abundant earth. But we don’t. We live in a world of brokenness, sin, and pain, in a paradise lost where all of these things enter our lives without our choice. People hurt and disappoint us, we hurt and disappoint ourselves, and we’re plugged into the global hurts and disappointments happening to people across the world. As I shared in my last post, out of nowhere, chronic illness entered my life and changed everything from my ability to maintain the workload I always had, to my day to day comfortability in my own body. I didn’t do anything to make that happen; I didn’t seek it out; it simply happened. And that is how pain is: unexpected, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Indeed, these are the unique features of suffering that render many faithless, as its randomness does not align with the ordered justice our hearts long for. Pain is indeed a fact of life on this side of eternity, and it seems that we believe joy and enjoyment are too.

In the most basic sense, they are. The beauty of a sunset can meet you at any moment, as can the kindness of a stranger. We don’t earn the beauty of life that is around us, nor the happenstance (or blessings) of meeting a new person who might become a best friend, or the love of our life. Those are indeed beautiful infusions of joy and enjoyment into our lives. But these moments do not sustain our joy on their own; they require our decision to opt in, to choose to observe or invite them into our lives.

Most often, we slip into a monotonous cycle of work, responsibilities, meeting needs, and caretaking, with moments of enjoyment being reduced to mere rest, like scrolling on our phones or mindlessly watching a TV show. Then our brains are wired to scan to ensure safety, leading us to notice the hard things much more easily than we can detect the good. Part of our fallen condition is this faulty hardwiring adapted to survive the wilderness of life on this side of eternity. So, as life gets more complicated, enjoyment gives way to surviving. We settle for numbing ourselves such that the pains of life, or its monotony, aren’t felt quite so palpably. But this is not joy.

Opt-in to Joy

The solution is to accept that opportunities for joy and enjoyment don’t simply seek us out as we’re living our lives- even all that does happen serendipitously: joy comes from our choosing it, from noticing the good that is indeed sewn into the fabric of the world. We have to carve out space for joy! For me, that has looked like making time to read fiction, an act that isn’t “useful,” but simply brings me pleasure; choosing to put down my to-do list when opportunities for quality time with friends presents itself, choosing to live less urgently, and making literal space in my week for moments of enjoyment over productivity. Opt-ing into joy means cultivating it in your life, not with a “treat yourself” approach to life, but one that puts in the work to sow habits that bloom into experiences of joy and enjoyment. It’s not about overspending, consumerism, or indulgence; it’s about saying yes to connection, community, and the parts of life that feel inconvenient when your focus is productivity and usefulness.

Building new neuropathways

To retrain my brain to notice the serendipitous joy all around us, I have started using the notebook I told you about. I simply carry it around, with a pen, so that when unexpected moments of joy occur, whether through the kind words of a friend or a beautiful sight on a walk, or a stunning Broadway show- I can write it down. I write so that I remember what happened, but then I reflect on how it felt. Only for one page of a tiny Moleskine. It takes roughly 1-2 minutes each time; sometimes it takes less than a minute, but the act of noticing and holding on to what you’re noticing can help you attune to all that is good, true, and lovely!

Opting in to joy really is beginning to reshape my life and my mind, and I truly believe it can help reshape yours, too.