Joy Log 001: I failed at joy. 🥴
Status: Experiment In Progress
Joy Logs are behind-the-scenes dispatches from my joy experiment. Normally exclusive to Lounge members, but this first one’s on the house.
So here’s something ridiculous: I started a project called The Joy Experiment… and immediately failed at it.
I’m not talking failed like “Oops, I missed a day”. I’m talking failed like I ghosted my own joy agenda. I made a plan (monthly joy activities! Woot!), announced it, got excited… and then quietly stopped following the plan.
Which raises the very not-joyful question: Can you be a failure at joy? (Apparently: yes. Yes, you can.)
The Situation
This whole experiment started because at the end of 2024, life felt flat. I wasn’t unhappy. But I also wasn’t laughing as much. It was like someone had turned down the color saturation in my world. I wasn’t delighting in things the way I used to.
I started asking myself: When was the last time I'd done something for no other reason than just for the joy of it? When was the last time I laughed at my own awkwardness or felt the thrill of trying something new?
So that’s when The Joy Experiment was born.
The idea was to do something new each month that would get me out of my comfort zone. Something that would shake things up a little, light some fire, and bring some much-needed vibrance.
I was also working with the hypothesis that fun and adventure don’t need to cost a fortune or require an exotic zip code. They can be simple, cheap, nearby. Things anyone can try.
All good, so far, yeah?
Then, Little Miss Planner showed up and turned it into a corporate offsite. She came up with a monthly plan to “implement” The Joy Experiment. A list of new activities to do each month was created: karaoke one month, cooking another. Learning a dance routine was first up on the list. There was even a daredevil idea to take a picture of a stranger every day for a month. (Who was I kidding? Have I met me?)
Anyhow, the plan was set. There was a Notion dashboard. A tracking and reporting template. A metrics system.
Basically: the death of joy.
Only, I didn’t realize I was killing it.
A couple of weeks in, I noticed the spark I felt when I dreamt this up? Gone. Dancing — something that usually made me happy — felt like a big “ugh”. Even the choreographer, who I used to adore, became a reminder of this grand experiment that made me roll my eyes.
I was rolling my eyes at my own joy experiment!
How sad was that!
So then, I just stopped doing anything. Well, not ANY thing. Just anything that was on the corporate-sponsored joy bonanza. 🙄
If an activity was on the plan, I didn’t want to do it.
Eventually, I had to admit: it wasn’t working. Not just the schedule. The whole approach.
💌 This is where Joy Log 001 shifts from messy confession to what changed next and how I’m rethinking joy from the ground up.
The rest of this post is for Lounge members only (aka the people who get the real-time dispatches from this slightly chaotic experiment). If that sounds like your kind of weird, come join us. 👇