On Fighting Cynicism and Choosing Joy

What happens when we resist the impulse to be miserable and instead look for gratitude?

There is nothing like a few days of feeling supremely awful to remind you of how wonderful and joy-filled life is when you’re not feeling supremely awful. Am I right? (Or, I guess, a few bad days is a surefire way to land you in wallowing, cynical, woe-is-me despair.)

I spent the last chunk of the week feeling supremely awful with a fever, doing nothing but watching children’s movies and drinking electrolytes. And here I am now, gloriously mended. Every time I get sick, I come out of it feeling like a child discovering snow. Pure joy. Maybe it’s because I’ve been forced to actually slow down enough to appreciate what’s around me—the sunshine is so good, the earth so beautiful, my mind so fresh and grateful. I’m grateful to be here, to be living this life in this body.

Has gratitude fallen out of style? I hope I’m still tuned into the self-help/wellness world enough to be able to say that…yeah, it kind of has. Back circa 2016, the internet and wellness world was chock full of proponents of expressing gratitude and being the light. For a while, now, though, the dominant emphasis has been on changing things—the world, our lives, bodies, reality—instead of appreciating what is here and what is good. Maybe this is because gratitude doesn’t sell as well, or because gratitude can come across as a sort of passive, head-in-the-sand practice—we can’t just be grateful, when there are so many terrible things that need to be tended to!

But we can be grateful right now, and, we must. On its own, appreciation for what we already have and what is already true is a practice that will shift our perspectives, and thus, the way we approach our lives and the people in them. It generates peace; connects us to that absolute okayness that lives inside each of us. Sure, pair your gratitude with action to get the ball rolling on manifesting change—first, though, stop and appreciate what’s around you. Find where gratitude lives. Spend more time moving from that place.

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To some extent, you can alter your life by adjusting the where/what/when of your daily activities to make them more or less enjoyable. You can create a life full of wonderful things. And still—sometimes you get a stomach virus, or are stuck in a job longer than you want, or are stuck doing any of the hundreds of things you’d rather were different. A lot of life will remain out of your control, for as long as you are alive. How are you going to be when those things happen? How are you choosing to live when things are terrible, and how are you choosing to live when things are wonderful?

Your attitude about all the annoying, mundane, awful, and beautiful tasks of life influences your quality of life. Your ability to find joy, be grateful, and relinquish the impulse to be cynical or miserable is what can turn a decent existence into a profoundly joyful and delightful one.

On this subject, Maria Popova of The Marginalian offers much to be considered and practiced. Her long-standing online publication is devoted to exploring our search for meaning, which she does eloquently “through science and philosophy, […] through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder.”¹

Here’s what she says on fighting cynicism and choosing joy.

“Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior…It is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive.

There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.”

There, she said it—the antidote to cynicism is to choose to live sincerely, with your whole heart, bending always toward growth. Also, to choose joy.

“Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature.”

Then she says, importantly,

“Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called[…] “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.” [emphasis mine]

As we all know by now but surely forget—chasing a perfect, frictionless life is a lonely rat race that gets us nowhere fast. Luckily, choosing joy is not dependent on living without friction or frustration: We can choose it at any point, by paying attention to “the little joys”—and we know what those are. There are a dozen that passed each of us by already today. What happens if we notice those more often? If we were to create more of those, more often?

We do not want to end up jaded cynics (there are plenty of those already). We also don’t need to already be biological optimists, those people who constantly ooze happiness at no seeming expense of effort. We can, however, choose joy more often. We can choose to live sincerely, believing in the goodness of the human spirit. We can appreciate what is already here, what we already have. We can also want to change some of that.

You don’t have to wait to recover from a stomach virus to notice the absolute beauty of the world around you. You don’t have to wait for anything, after all. There is plenty to be grateful for and in awe of right now. Being open to noticing it will prove this point to you, over and over again.

Maggie

1. If you want to be inspired, read The Marginalian.