How To Create a Personal Archive of Joy
Collect joy & stock up for bad times.
Hello! :) I’m Nospheratt, and this is Joy Every Week - a weekly quest to find joy in everyday things.
In How To Find Joy When Everything Is Terrifying I said:
Stock up on rest as if you were a camel about to cross the desert - because we kind of are.
Today it occurred to me that we need to stock up on joy, too.
For those times when we’re in the pit of misery. When we’re so tired we can’t think straight (or queer 😉). When we forgot what joy means or even feels like.
Collecting Joy
I’ve been collecting bits of joy since 2011 and I can tell you that it helps a lot. With everything.
It makes you more aware of small, daily moments of joy.
It helps you to experience and remember big moments of joy more vividly.
It teaches you to pay attention.
It reminds you of why you do the things you do.
It shows you that your life, as hard as it is, it’s not only made of sadness and despair.1
It gives you motivation to keep going, to keep fighting, to not give up.
Systems For Joy
I have a whole system to collect joy, which I’ve developed through the years and adapted to myself; my way of thinking, feeling and doing things. It has become an integral part of my life, something I use almost every day.
It helped me go through depression, the worst of the pandemic, personal losses, moving continents twice. It helps me deal with anxiety, uncertainty and stress.
It allows me to connect with my joy every day. Every time I feel like it.
Every time I need it.
So I’m going to show part of it2, hoping you’ll find something useful for yourself.
Please keep in mind: you don’t have to do something as involved as my setup.
Pick one or two things to start, and try it out. Experiment.
Even if you like the idea of doing all of it, don’t start everything at once. You’ll get overwhelmed and stressed — exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish here — and you’ll abandon it. Start slowly, with the thing that feels easier, most comfortable or exciting, and add other stuff over time.
Back in 2011 I created my system in Dokuwiki (a self-hosted wiki), and nowadays most of it lives in Notion. You can use anything that suits you, from paper to spreadsheets.
This Week’s Quest - Collecting Joy
Ideas & inspiration to find your joy.
1 - Daily List
I journal (almost) every day. Most days, I just write down two very simple lists:
Hard Stuff
I mean it when I say that looking for joy doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It’s important to acknowledge the things that suck. And it helps to get crap off my chest and process it.
Happy Stuff
Every bit of joy I’ve experienced during the day, small and big. “Mate” is a daily occurrence. Or things like “had a shower”, “took a walk”, “ice cream”. Yesterday was a lot of screaming about how much I love Deadpool & Wolverine3. If I’m traveling, there will be stuff about that.
This is an easy, quick way to capture joy.
2 - Highlights Gallery
This is something I got from Marie Poulin: Tracking daily highlights with Notion.
The concept is very simple: you take notes about good things, things that gave you joy, made you smile or laugh. And then you go through your list at the end of the year - or month, or week, or whenever you need it.
It doesn’t matter what a highlight is, or how big or small it is. What matters is that’s a piece of joy.
If you look at my example above, there’s food, celebration, connection, visits to the nearby lake, a movie. A virtual panel I attended back in January. A fun thing we did — a homebrewing workshop. The first snow of the year, and the very tiny snowman we made with it.
Simple things. Everyday things. And I feel happy just looking at them; I feel joy. I’m glad I took the time to collect these moments so I can enjoy them now and again.
By the way, most of these highlights are just a picture and the title. I write notes for some of them — mostly travel stuff that I don’t want to forget. But day to day, I make it as simple as possible, so it doesn’t become a chore or a complicated endeavor.
Even if you don’t use Notion, the video is good inspiration. Take a look if you’re interested in doing this, and adapt it to whatever you like to use.
It can be slips of paper like Marie used to do, or a notebook, or a dedicated album on Google Photos. You can do sketches or scrapbooking. Get creative and do something that fits you and your joy.
3 - Appreciation Collection
Whenever somebody says something nice about me or the stuff I do, or someone does something nice for me, I make a note and save it to my Appreciation Collection.
It may sound, I don’t know, vain or self-centered to do this, but it’s not. It’s healthy, and going through it helps so much when I feel like everybody hates me, nobody cares about me, I’m useless and a failure and and and….
(I may or may not call this my “I-Don’t-Suck Database” sometimes.)
Anyways. We see ourselves through distorted mirrors so often — depression, anxiety, societal bullshit, family expectations, etc — that having a little treasure chest full of kind and appreciative visions of us may be life-changing. Give it a try.
If the thought of it makes you feel embarrassed, remember that this is just for you. Nobody needs to know about it. I won’t tell. 😉
4 - Fun Stuff Lists
This may be the easier of the bunch: make lists of fun stuff, things that make you laugh, that fill your heart, that give you a buoyant feeling in the bones.
Youtube playlists, browser bookmarks, a list on your Notes app of choice, a Notion gallery — anything that’s easy to access and remember to use will work.
In my list I have things like:
A flashmob by a symphony orchestra & choirs in Barcelona in 2012, and the version they did in 2020 during lockdown. 🥲
My favorite Movie Dance Compilation, which is 110% pure perfection
The Supernatural Parody by The Hillywood Show. I’m aware of all the problems with SPN, but this video represents to me everything that was good about it.
Bohemian Rhapsody Played by 100+ year old fairground organ and by the Muppets
The Avengers: Endgame Cast Singing "We Didn't Start the Fire" and this amazing Marvel Edit - Glitter & Gold
People having outrageous, mosh-pit-style fun at Oxford Symphony Orchestra concerts
As you see, anything that sparks joy goes on the list.
📚Reads
➡️ Catch the moments of your life
(CW for the above link: talking about dying)
Some of us might call this mindfulness (or the goal of it, anyway). Others might call it being present. I see the entire point of life right there in that exchange. You see two characters, one on the up-and-up, the other in his twilight years (though, emotionally you could argue he’s on the up-and-up) — and both are (trying to) choose to see the beautiful pieces of life they're experiencing. The fullness that is life, even and especially the little boring or insignificant parts.
(…) So many of us live in fantasy future moments we'll never reach instead of finding ways to appreciate the present right now. And speaking as someone whose "present" is way worse than an imagined future, I get the impulse to escape the moment. It's why I feel so strongly that we invest in ourselves and our dreams right now.
I love serendipity. This crossed my dash yesterday, and it’s very related with today’s topic. To catch moments of joy — that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
➡️ The Lasting Power of Good Memories
A positive spin on our past can help inure us against pain.
Recalling happy moments triggers reward circuitry in the brain, the same circuitry that might be activated when we win a little bit of money. Pulling up those positive memories was enough to cause improvements in their subjects’ moods.
(…) Advancing that work, Delgado and Speer also found that happy memories can inoculate someone against stress.
➡️ The power of reliving positive memories through photos
This feeling of positivity was directly associated with the pleasant memories I had of the experiences captured in the photos. I reminisced albeit momentarily, yet felt a surge of positivity almost all through the day. My wife also mentioned about the upbeat mood I was in that day. The other unintended effect was that she joined me in sifting through the photos and we talked about the great times we shared.
This feeling of positivity and its importance in maintaining mental wellbeing reminded me of the learnings from my studies in positive psychology. I looked into this a bit deeper. It turns out, there is a spate of research that suggests remembering happy times may offer protection for mental health. Here is how.
Next week, I have something different for you: a practical guide to deal with doomscrolling. And the week after that, we’ll talk about how to add hope and joy to your daily scrolling.
Don’t want to miss it?
That’s It For Today!
Thank you so much for being here. 💛 I really appreciate it — even if it may take me some time to answer your comments and replies, I read and value every one of them. So tell me: what are your favorite pieces of joy you’ve collected?
Until next time. —Nospheratt
Evolutionarily speaking, human beings are wired to remember bad things way more than the good stuff.
If there’s interest, I can talk more about this is a future edition. Let me know!
Holy shit it was so much fun, I want to watch it again immediately.