Kate Bowler
Kate Bowler is a four-time New York Times bestselling author, award-winning podcast host, and Professor of Religious History at Duke University.
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The Well
The brain-deep emotion that matters more than happiness
Happiness collapses the moment hardship arrives. Joy doesn’t. Historian Kate Bowler explains why joy can coexist with pain — and why that makes it a stronger, more fulfilling emotion.
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6 min
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with
Kate Bowler
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Joy is often mistaken for a stronger version of happiness. But historian and writer Kate Bowler argues that they are fundamentally different emotions.
Happiness, she explains, depends on things going well. It’s cumulative, fragile, and easily undone. Joy, by contrast, can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty. It doesn’t erase what’s broken — it helps hold it together.
Drawing from psychology, faith traditions, and her own experience living with stage four cancer, Bowler explores why joy is less about ease and more about connection, openness, and love. It’s not a mood or an achievement, but a way of seeing reality clearly and still saying yes to life. Joy, she suggests, isn’t a bonus for the fortunate. It’s something that carries us when happiness no longer can.
KATE BOWLER: You can be joyful and sad at the same time, but you can't be happy and sad at the same time. That's what makes joy often, like, so confusing to people.
My name is Kate Bowler, and I'm a historian and a podcaster and a writer, and I study issues about luck and meaning and what makes life, well, beautiful.
Joy can coexist with the deepest and often most painful emotions because it is this bright, enlivening feeling. Joy has this way of binding together all these broken pieces and still making you laugh at the exact same time, which honestly is why I think it's, like, the most interesting thing to study.
I spent a really long time as a very unlucky person. (laughs) Actually, that's not true. Briefly, I was extremely lucky. I finally had this baby I'd always wanted after years of infertility. Then I got my dream job at Duke University, which does not sound like everybody's dream, but all I ever wanted to do was be a historian and hide myself away in a turret with books and gargoyles and many grateful students. And I was married to my high school sweetheart, and I just had the feeling like life was just finally paying off.
And then I had a really devastating season of powerful unluck. I was diagnosed with stage four cancer after a really long, awful stretch of begging for care. And then after that, it was almost like happiness just wasn't enough anymore. I was just never gonna be able to, like, add up my life in the same way, so I needed something more existentially gritty. I needed joy.
There are certain powerful experiences like joy that can actually help you be carried throughout a terrible time and into a new season, and so that's what I went looking for.
People often confuse happiness and joy 'cause it all just sounds like the positive end of the spectrum. They just think they're synonyms. That's partly because Americans are obsessed with happiness, we have an enormous happiness industry. Happiness will start to look like wellbeing and self-care and flourishing and kids in matching denim, but joy is actually something much more complicated.
Psychologists make a pretty fine distinction between happiness as a definable set of qualities, as ease as a kind of psychologically relaxed state. It's also really contextual, meaning that it's cumulative. It happens because things have gone well. That's what makes happiness lovely, but also makes it very fragile. One thing goes wrong and you can topple the whole mood of happiness.
Joy engages not just the dopamine and the, like, happier parts of our brain chemistry, it still coexists with our stress systems, with really dark emotions, with despair, with enormous pain, meaning that we're not escaping the reality of what we're in. We're adding another layer on top of it.
Joy is one of the most powerful human emotions, not just because it is sweet and fleeting, but because of its enormous capacity to change us. It makes us more grateful. It makes us more hopeful. It delights us, which is to say it makes us laugh. It's this great existential yes that reminds us that life is still worth loving, even in the midst of the worst times.
It allows us to look at reality with new eyes, and also you just have this feeling like no matter what, I see it all, and somehow it's still good.
Joy has a very special place in particular in the Christian tradition as a gift, as like a divine gift. It's a moment of being beyond yourself that people of faith would describe as transcendence, and that's because you feel, psychologically, it has this real bonding feeling. You feel very connected to everything, so that means you can feel very connected to other people. You might also feel very connected to the divine.
Do you feel emotionally open to the possibility of things spiritually, psychologically, and just communally?
Joy is sort of the whole package of bringing together what can feel like a very unreconcilable experience. Most of the preconditions for joy are actually like the direct opposite of what we need to be our machine selves.
There are a couple things that pop up over and over again as preconditions to joy, and I think one of the most powerful is emotional availability and connection. I think a person who wants to be surprised is a person who's much more likely to find joy.
Ultimately, if we wanna be more joyful people, we are probably going to have to, like, put down the phone and close the laptop and think of ourselves as being experientially surprisable.
So, happiness is just an emotional state. Joy is a story. It is a feeling that somehow in your spirit that it feels good to be alive, to be here, to be put together with whatever you have left.
That's what joy can do. It can take you from the very bottom to the very top, and mostly what it takes is love.
I think most people get joy wrong because they think it's a bonus level of happiness. I think it would be a huge relief to the person struggling with depression, to the person right in the middle of fresh grief, to the person who is just frankly, deeply bored by their life that joy is definitely for them.
And I think it being both emotional and existential is what makes it feel gritty and real and, like, something that will carry you.
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