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Ingrid is a designer and author whose groundbreaking work reveals the hidden influence of our surroundings on our emotions and wellbeing. As a former design director at IDEO, and author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, Ingrid empowers people to find more joy in life and work through design. Her immensely popular TED talk “Where Joy Hides and How to Find it” has been viewed more than 17 million times. Ingrid has over fifteen years of experience in design and branding, having led design programs for Target, Condé Nast, Eileen Fisher, American Express, Pepsico, and the US government, among others; and has been featured in leading media including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Today Show, and Fast Company.
I regularly watch your podcasts and continue to keep my head in the Intersections space, to really appreciate the offerings, and to consider them an essential part of my life.
This episode was mirrored by own experience about how some successfully cope with terrible loss of a loved one: by balancing such with joyful remembrances.
In this episode of Intersections, Prof. Hitendra Wadhwa has a conversation with Ingrid Fetell Lee on the topic “How Ordinary Things Can Create Extraordinary Happiness”.
We are made to believe that joy must be earned, that it is to be experienced only in certain conditions, and that it comes from inner strivings. But what if joy were the very basis of our being, and what if there were simple things in our outer environment that we could tap to infuse our everyday moments with joy? Is joy a very personal pursuit, or are there universal principles across humanity for how we can activate joy? How can we transform our institutions, workplaces and public spaces to maximize the joy we experience from being part of them?
The episode “How to Fulfill Life’s Greatest Desires” offers key insights on:
Greetings everyone! Warm welcome back to Intersections, where our aspiration is to dissolve the boundaries between inner and outer, East and West, purpose and profits. Fundamentally, any of these boundaries that limit us at some points in seeing the full possibilities in our own potential, in life and in humanity.
Today, I have with us the great pleasure of a conversation that we will do on a topic that is very close to fundamentally all our hearts—the pursuit of joy. We are going to have in our midst Ingrid Fetell Lee. She is a designer, an author, and a leading researcher on this subject of joy. Let me give a brief introduction to Ingrid; then, I'll bring her into our conversation.
Ingrid has over 15 years of experience in design and branding work and has led the design programs for some of the world's leading brands like Target, Condé Nast, American Express, Pepsi, Eileen Fisher, and Diageo. But, she has also since then moved on to really a deep pursuit, an exploration on this topic of joy. Her work tends to reveal what the hidden foundations are of our surroundings and the effect of the influence of the surroundings on our emotions and well-being. She has a TED talk on this topic of where joy hides and how to find it, which has more than 17 million views. She is also the author of a groundbreaking investigation on this topic of joy, a book called Joyful the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, critically acclaimed by some of the leading lights in this whole science of human nature today, like Susan Cain and Adam Grant talking about how this book has the power to change everything.
She has been featured in some of the leading media like Fast Company, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Here's a beautiful quote from her to get us started. She says, "Too often we move through the physical world as if it were a stage set, a mute backdrop for our daily activities. Yet in reality, it is alive with opportunities for inspiration, wonder, and joy." On that note, let me invite into our midst Ingrid.
Thank you so much for joining us. Warm welcome.
Thank you so much for having me. It's a joy to be with you.
Same here. In fact, a very special joy. I'm going to reveal something to you which I would typically feel not very comfortable revealing to the public. The good news is that, since we are recording the session, our friends don't actually know what date this conversation is happening at, and so I can do that in private with you while not sharing it outside. But today is my birthday.
Oh, Happy Birthday!
Thank you. I can't imagine a more special way of beginning this day for me than a conversation about joy. From a very early age, joy has been at the very center of my exploration and quest as well. You have pursued it in some really meaningful and beautiful ways. For me, it was more of an inner quest, a mystic quest of studying some of the truth seekers of the ages and how they had explored the texture of joy, the extent of joy that one can experience. Can it be infinite? Can it be ever anew, can it be ever conscious, is it dependent on situations? When I chanced upon your book some time back, I was like, this is wonderful. This is exactly what the world needs, a more modern treatment of a timeless topic. Very joyful again to have you with us, and thank you for all the beautiful work you're doing.
Thank you.
There's one thing that you share in your work and your book that I wanted to maybe start with, which is the relationship between joy and happiness. You have something quite thought-provoking that you offer to us. You say that joy lives in our moments, and in some ways, it's a lot simpler and easier to find than happiness. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the relationship between these two?
Well, we often use these two words joy and happiness interchangeably, right? Yet they mean different things. Happiness, from a scientific perspective, is a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It has to do with whether we feel like we have a sense of meaning and purpose in life, how we feel about our work, our health, how connected we feel to other people. All of those things go into this pretty complex equation that we call happiness, whereas joy is much simpler and more immediate.
When psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion. It's something that we can measure through direct physical expressions, things like smiling, laughter, a feeling of wanting to jump up and down. Those are all different ways that we can understand and know we're experiencing a moment of joy. I think that as a culture, we tend to be obsessed with the pursuit of happiness with this idea of a long-lasting, happily ever after; we'll find it, and then we'll just have it, and we won't have to do anything to maintain it. We'll just get there. We associate that a lot of times with big milestones in life, we'll get the promotion, we'll get the house, we'll get the baby or the partner or whatever. Then we'll just be happy. But we all know that life really isn't like that. There isn't that kind of durable state of happiness.
What actually is more accessible to us is these little moments of joy; they're so small sometimes that we think of them as trivial. We overlook them. Yet they're really important because that, I think, is the foundation of real happiness, of real well-being, is actually noticing these little moments and watching how they add up.
There's something really powerful in that idea that rather than seek to wait for a certain milestone to be accomplished in order to find that perfect, sustained happiness, to make it our responsibility to seek out joy in every moment. I think that's what I'm hearing from you.
There are some moments in life that are not going to be joyful. It's not to say that every single moment is able to be turned into a joy. There are some parts of life I think that aren't. But I think that in any given day, we can find moments of joy and even in difficult times. The pandemic has really brought this to light that a lot of the factors I mentioned that go into happiness have been challenged for a lot of people. Health, a sense of connectedness, a sense of meaning in our work, we're all re-evaluating our relationship to work. That's all happening right now. There are a lot of things that make it hard to be happy right now. And yet, we can still find these little moments of joy in a day. That might mean that you find three moments of joy in a day, not every moment, but they are still accessible even when times are really hard.
Yeah. That reminds me of some research I'd read a few years back on the science of coping with loss and grieving. One of the key findings that jumped out for me there was how you find that there are some people who are able to cope with, for example, the loss of a loved one, in a way that we might all look at and say, "You know what, that's a pretty healthy, heroic, authentic way to cope with it. They're not disconnected from the grief. They're not disconnected from the sorrow of that loss, the permanence of that loss." Yet, they are also finding moments in their day while they are going through the grieving process to actually be in joy, to be in a place of deep appreciation for what this person has meant to them, to fondly remember a certain lighthearted moment that they had with them and even giggle and smile at memorial service, work on lighting people's hearts up a little bit. So, it reminds me a bit of that discipline of how, even in the harder moments, there might be little pieces where you can actually infuse joy.
I think that's right. Actually, I think the research shows that when you allow those little moments of joy into your process of grieving or mourning, it actually makes you more resilient that taking time to experience those little moments of joy; people who do that are more likely to recover from the traumatic event or from the loss and feel a sense of perspective, feel a sense of health and well-being after, as opposed to being fully weighed down and unable to move past the tragedy.
That's beautiful. One of the things I do in my class is have my students share some aspect of the personal journey, and I'm just sparked with something here because one of the students shared a story. He said, "When I was growing up, I was once on a train with my father, and we were going somewhere. Late at night, I wanted to go to the bathroom, and I left the carriage, and I went to the bathroom, and then I came back and then laid down with him, and I slept. The next morning, I heard his voice booming in the corridors of the carriage, looking for me. Then I woke up and realized I'm sleeping next to the wrong man in the dark. He even woke up a little startled. Then my father is going from cabin to cabin, and he actually comes to our cabin and sees me and this man there." Then he says, "I'll never forget the look on my father's face." He said it was a mixture of relief in finding a son. At the same time, a sense of consternation and anger at who is this guy sleeping next to him? And a sense of just hilarity and comedic relief because he just realized this is what my son did. He just went to the bathroom and just came back and did something really silly. He says, "Each time I remember that moment, it just brings a smile to my face. He said my father passed away a few years later. But, I want to share this story with you all because I want to invite you to cure it and really take to heart these sweet moments that you have with your loved ones so that from time to time when you really miss them, it would bring a tear to your eye, but it can also bring a smile to your face."
Many of those moments are so bittersweet, right? But I think it is the height of our joy that will determine the depths of our sorrow and vice versa. Our ability to feel that sorrow means that we really loved, that we were really in it. I think if we can take these moments now to think of these delightful experiences, these little moments that might seem so fleeting as not to matter, and really capture them and soak them in, it will mean that we will feel greater loss later, but I think have been worth it because we will have really felt our joy.
Wow, what a paradoxical but powerful point you're making, beautiful point. Thank you.
Ingrid, let's think about this quest now that you're inviting people to take to find those pockets and those moments of joy. One of the things that really intrigues me about your work is the whole recognition that there is an outside-in approach that we can more methodically and mindfully take to activate and join us rather than purely an inside out, which has been a tradition, for example, in spiritual and mindfulness circles.
Can you talk a little bit about the difference between these two and what draws you to the outside in?
Well, on the team of Intersections, I come to the study of joy from a different angle, I think than most of the people in the scientific community or in the wellness or self-help community, or even from people in the philosophical community. I come to this as a designer. I studied industrial design, and it was in my first year of graduate school for industrial design that a professor made a comment. He said that your work gives me a feeling of joy. I had all of the things that I had made over the course of the semester lined up on a table, and I was looking at cups, a stool, a lamp, and I thought, what? How does that create joy? There was this panel of professors in front of me, and they just waved their hands a lot. I think that's something designers do because they're trying to make tangible a lot of ineffable things. So, there's a lot of hand waving that goes on in design, maybe in a lot of a lot of academic circles. They couldn't answer this question. That was what started my exploration into joy, not because I thought, oh, joy is so interesting, and I want to study it, though I later found that that's the case. But because there was something that I couldn't understand or explain, which was how a tangible object, how this physical thing, could spark joy in someone else.
I set out to understand that, and I started asking people about the things and the places that brought them joy. As I did this, I noticed that there were certain things that came up again and again. Things like bubbles, cherry blossoms in the springtime, confetti, rainbow sprinkles, rainbows, polka dots, pops of bright color. There were all these things that just seemed to be not just joyful for a few people, not just joyful for one gender, ethnicity, or people who are older or younger; everyone seems to find these things joyful the world over. I started to wonder if these might be universally joyful things, and if they were universally joyful things, then what did that mean? How could something be universally joyful events? A little bit like the Jungian collective unconscious? Where does this come from? This idea that things could be could spark this feeling of joy all over the world.
I found that there are certain evolutionary reasons why some of these things might be joyful and relates to their physical attributes. Bright color is joyful in the world over. If you think about any festival, any celebration you see all over the world, we're about to enter Lunar New Year, which is one of the most colorful. They all have bright colors. You can picture them, imagine them in gray and brown and black. It doesn't have the same impact, right? So, there's something inextricably linking color to joy. We see this even in children's drawings. Even very young children before school will use bright colors to represent happy scenes. When they're representing sad or angry scenes, they use dark colors. They use black, brown, and purple to represent those scenes. So, there's something happening there.
All evolutionary explanations are speculative to some extent. But one explanation is that bright color vision evolved to help us find ripe fruits and young leaves, our primate ancestors looking for these things in the treetops. When we see a pop of bright color, it is almost a vestigial sign of energy of nourishment. We still feel energized when we see these things, even though we're not going to go eat the little red car that we see passing us on the street or the yellow raincoat, but those things still give us this feeling of energy and joy. For me, the knowledge that there are certain things that can predictably elicit this feeling of joy is really exciting because it means that to your point about inside out versus outside in, we can look for moments of joy. We can start to spot certain things that are going to be reliable predictors of joy in our surroundings.
I really like the idea of looking for universals. I'm very drawn to that notion that hidden behind our experience of life are certain universal laws of human nature. Regardless, as you said, of ethnicity and gender and all of the other ways in which we try to get identified with certain socio-demographic or other factors in our life that, there lies just this common humanity, the shared humanity, untapped potential that all of us can explore. The fact that you found these universals is as beautiful.
I also wonder, does that collective consciousness have a certain temporal quality to it? For instance, if you were to have done this analysis like a thousand years ago, do you think that even while there was a certain universality to the findings you might have generated at that time, they might have been somewhat different from what you're generating today so that we're all kind of like subtly influencing each other, in consciousness terms. But we also shift perhaps over centuries. I am just naively speaking. You're the designer here, and I'm just an amateur consumer of design. But if I look back in the yesteryears, in a sense like, the design aesthetic of a certain era or period changed over time in terms of what it is that people at least put in the museums.
I think that's a really interesting question, and I think it relates to how this aesthetics operate in our lives and in our emotional world. The way that I think about it is that they operate on three different levels. You have your personal preferences or your individual joys. That might be things like a T-shirt you got at a concert 20 years ago that is so faded and worn out that no one else would think it's joyful, but it still has joy for you. It still has resonance for you. There are certain things that we all have that we've learned through experience or that we're drawn to because of our personalities. Those are individual.
Then there are cultural joys—things like food we love to eat, certain kinds of dress that we associate with joy. Sports teams are part of the culture. There's the culture and sub-cultural joys. That's the second level that's shared with more people.
Then there's this universal layer. This universal layer, it's not to say that everyone is going to express these preferences all the time. They're still going to be people who would prefer to have a grey and black apartment to one with lots of color in it. But these universal preferences get filtered through our culture and then filtered through our individual preferences. So, they're still underneath there. There's something visceral that's happening. It's an unconscious layer of response, but there are things that modify and modulate it.
Over time, a thousand years ago, there would have been different cultural influences, and there would have been different personal influences because of that culture. That all would have modified these universal preferences in a different way. But they still would be present. Because they are related to our DNA, they're related to how the environment was when our ancestors evolved. We are talking about 80 million years of evolution that sort of shaped these preferences where our environment was relatively stable. Our ancestors were living on Savannas; they were surrounded by greenery, by open spaces with some tree cover. It was a pretty consistent environment, and the things that would have aided their survival would be pretty consistent, and the dangers would also be pretty consistent.
That's really what shaped these universal preferences. But of course, they get shifted and modulated by what's happening in the moment.
Yeah, that's a nice structure to give it. I'm finding that very helpful. The individual and personal, the cultural and the universal, how the universe gets re-expressed in much more unique ways for different people and cultures over time. I like that. Thank you.
There's one more thing I would add to that, which has to do with your point about design aesthetics and how design aesthetics change over time. I think it's really important to note that design aesthetics don't usually reflect these universal preferences. They often reflect ideologies of the time, political ideologies, and religious ideologies. I would say that the design that is present in public space, although private space is a little bit different because it's generally not as controlled by architects, it's more designed by people and their needs. But public space is very much dictated by power and who has power, and what they want to achieve with that power. I think that if we look at whether it was a thousand years ago or now, the kinds of buildings that get built, I don't think most of them reflect deep human needs and certainly not human emotional needs.
If I were to build on your point, the emotion that they're serving is not necessarily joy. In other words, those in power and those who had the resources to build these structures may have wanted to evoke something in us which was emotional but probably not joy in some of these contexts with some of the paintings.
I think that's right.
OK, wonderful. Actually, there's such a wealth of insight and possibilities to each of these aspects of our conversation. We could just spend all the time on this and yet, I feel drawn to pulling us forward because there's so much more to this story.
In that spirit, there is this really beautiful idea that you have offered up. I'm going to quote you here. You say, "If we can say that we have universal rights to life and liberty, health and safety and that these are worth fighting for, then I also think we need to consider a universal right to joy." Let's talk about that. What is it that prompts you to feel that joy is so perhaps like innate in the human condition that we can see it almost as a right in all circumstances?
Well, if you think about what joy evolves for, because our emotions are evolved responses. We have six primary emotions. I think it got broadened to seven over time, but generally speaking, we are considered to have six primary emotions. It's anger, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and joy. Joy is the only positive one in that set of basic emotions that are consistent in the world over. Surprise can be positive or negative, but joy is the only consistently positive emotion. Joy evolved to signal to us that we are moving in the direction of things that are likely to increase our potential to thrive, to flourish. When I see those plants behind you, I see lushness; I see life. It gives me a feeling of joy, and that tells me that I'm moving toward something that might be helpful and might be sustaining for me as an organism.
To say that the baseline goal of existence is survival, and that's all we expect people to be entitled to, has implications for how we construct our society. It says that people who are poor or who are vulnerable in some ways, really, all they should expect is just to survive. That's enough. To me, that's not enough. I don't think that that is what the human condition is here for. I think it's very unfair to say that people who don't have certain resources or abilities should just aim to survive. I think that if joy is the sign of thriving and we all have a right to thrive because that's what we're here for, then I think we do have a universal right to joy. Then if that's the case, it changes how we look at the way that we design our systems. For example, our public housing is a really great example of this because those aesthetics of joy, the signs of joy, color, round shapes, all of these things, the lushness, greenery, these things that we associate with joy are notably absent. They're not just absent because it's cost-effective, although that's usually the reason that's used; it's because we have this philosophy in our society that people should just aim to have the bare minimum to survive. When in fact, I think these things are things that help us thrive. If we were to see people as having the dignity and the right to some joy in their lives, these small moments of joy, then we would think about those spaces differently. We would think about a lot of structures and systems in our society differently.
Folks, Ingrid's TED Talk is wonderful. In a very short offering from her, you get to see some really vivid imagery around ideas that Ingrid is talking about, those of like hospitals, very unjoyful corporate designs, housing projects, and beyond. It seems to me that maybe the world in the recent past has just assumed a certain monolithicness, if that's a word, to how we need to show up in certain circumstances, if you're living a life of a certain amount of struggle or if you're in the hospital and really facing some kind of like a serious health issue or if you are in an office that you have to do serious work, then what's the role of joy there? There's no role of joy there. So maybe we don't really need to think about infusing joy in the environment, right? I think the conversation we're having today is awakening us to the sensuality of joy as a key enabler of going from just surviving to thriving in everything we do.
Yes. I think that, if you believe that joy is an extra in life, which is how we condition people to see it, right? It's central to childhood, but then as we get older, joy, gets moved to the side and work takes center stage. We separate out work and joy. Joy is supposed to happen after work and on the weekends. We separate out. We're supposed to grow up and not be too joyful or colorful in the way that we dress. So, if we view joy as this extra and I think even more dangerously, if we view joy as a reward, as something we earn and we have to earn it, then it's very easy to look at people who are in vulnerable positions in society and say, "Well, did they earn it?" It's really funny how our model of emotions is tied to our political philosophy. This, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, which I think I read recently, is actually an impossibility. The whole point of that phrase was that it's actually literally impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That's how it was originally intended and we've taken it to become this value of hard work and individual virtue and all these things.
If that's our model, then we look at people who don't have certain things and we say, "Oh, they didn't earn joy. So how could they deserve joy?" And we look at people who earn lots of money and we say, "Well, they can do what they want because they earned it." Joy, along with resources, gets incredibly unequally distributed and we don't have a basis for having a problem with it because our fundamental model is that, joy is something that has to be earned.
Undoing that begins with an unlearning for ourselves. We have to disentangle joy from virtue and from money. We have to say that joy isn't something we earn, it is something we are inherently entitled to as living human beings. When we do that, we have to say that, "OK, that homeless guy over there is entitled to as much joy as I am. And you know what, that nurse who's been working hours and hours taking care of COVID patients who seems so virtuous, she also deserves the same amount of joy. She doesn't deserve any more joy because she works so hard and contributes to society." Joy is not tied to our contribution to society. It is tied to our inherent worth as human beings. That is a really hard lesson in a society that tells you that you are worth, what your work is, what your output is and what your contribution is. It's really hard. I'm still working on it. I'm still just discovering this. But it's hard.
That was so eloquent, so heartfelt and so important to hear. I loved it. I'm going to go back and listen to it again. One of the individuals I admire a lot is Mother Teresa and I was watching a documentary film on her, the real footage of Mother Teresa. One thing that struck me after 90 minutes of watching her and her sisters in action was that the predominant emotions that you see on their faces and their reactions in their everyday moments are two. One is love. Guess what the other one is? Joy. It was fascinating. Here they are in the midst of a fair amount of pain and suffering, right? Serving the dying and the destitute, the diseased and the people in all kinds of state of struggle. Yet, while they're holding those little emaciated babies at times and little children almost skeletal at times in their bodily profile because of the malnourishment and all of that, they're just pouring love, but they're also experiencing the joy of service, taking joy in the magical eyes of this baby or just the touch and the holding of this soul in their hands. It was a revelation. I think both for me and my students that I've shared this movie with them to recognize the fact that you don't give up their rights to joy just because you're in that state of struggle.
I will quote from her, actually, when she says, "The people we serve, they do not need to see your sullen face. Their life is already enough of a struggle." She was really always encouraging people to enter that space with love, a sense of service, but also with joy.
It's powerful to hear that and to reflect on that. It's almost like we feel that it's wrong to be so joyful when others are suffering. Yet, that doesn't make their lives any better. No one's life is improved by denying yourself joy. One of the things that has been so challenging about the pandemic is the distance. I think we often underrate the importance of just physical contact. The physical contact we have with people, the physical contact we have with the objects around us. The pandemic really brought that to light that the loss of sensory input from just being able to get out and be among other people, be in public places and see different things, the loss of touch, the loss of hugs, the loss of holding babies and all of that. It is a profound loss and it distances us from people and from things. It distances us from that emotion. I think so often, it is the physical sensations that are the trigger. For me, the smell of my toddler's head, like for so many parents, this is a very visceral thing. It doesn't mean if I can't smell that, I don't love them any less. But there is something visceral, emotional that gets activated from contact. It is why it's so important to us.
It's beautiful! I agree with you about the touch, the holding and the physical presence and connectivity as being such a natural source of joy. Congratulations on the toddler! I think you were telling me before the podcast recording that this is your first. What is the toddler's name?
Oh, his name is Graham.
Oh, wonderful! Well, I want to thank Graham for allowing us a little access to his mommy for period of time to allow us to have this conversation.
I'm curious about something that you build so richly in your book. That is what you call the aesthetics of joy. You talk about the power of the aesthetics of joy is that, they speak directly to our unconscious minds, bringing out the best in us without us ever being aware of it. Talk to us a little bit, if you can, about what are the aesthetics of joy?
I talked about how these universally joyful things that we see around like rainbow sprinkles, confetti and elements of nature. It's not the things themselves that bring us joy, it's their physical attributes, it's their sensorial attributes. In design, we use the term aesthetics to describe those sensorial attributes. Often when we use the word aesthetics, we're talking about vision, because that is our dominant sense. But you can also have movements that influence the aesthetics, scents, sounds, textures that can all be a part of aesthetics.
I identified 10 of these aesthetics of joy and they are reliably related to certain kinds of feelings of joy. Bright color and light are associated with energy. That's one of the aesthetics of joy. Another one is round shapes. Round shapes are associated with play and childhood. There's research that shows that when we see round shapes, they actually calm a part of the brain that is activated when we see sharp angles called the amygdala, and it's associated with fear and anxiety. If we're in a spiky room or surrounded by angular furniture, that part of the brain is going to be more active, even though we won't realize it. It's just happening unconsciously. When we look at curves and circles, it calms the mind, sets us at ease. Fluid curves have also been associated with creativity. It increases creativity and open mindedness.
These aesthetics of joy are influencing us without us even realizing it. Another one is harmony, which has to do with symmetry, balance, repetition, pattern. For example the pattern behind me, that's an expression of harmony.
One interesting study at the University of Chicago showed that students were asked to take a math test. They were shown pictures of environments that had lots of asymmetrical angles and then environments that had pictures of symmetrical environments. What they found is that the students who looked at asymmetrical environments were more likely to cheat when they went back and graded their own tests than those who looked at symmetrical environments. The amount of symmetry in our environments, which seems like such an inconsequential thing, actually influences the way we behave and it influences our behavior toward others. These aesthetics of joy, when I say they act on us unconsciously, they bring us joy, but they also influence our behavior in subtle ways that then changes our interactions with others, how trusting we are and how trustworthy, how connected we are to other people. All of those things can be influenced by our environments.
A few years back, we had the privilege of being able to build our own home. What happened is, we acquired this piece of land and we built this place and I didn't have anything to do with it. I left it all in the hands of my wife because I trust her much more than I trust myself in terms of ascetic instincts and just the practical vision of what this home should be. I actually literally didn't even go to the construction site until the home was fully built. I happened to be traveling at the time that we moved in. Basically, for like a couple of weeks when all the set up was done, I wasn't even in the same country. When I entered, it was pretty much all there. The little home palace was all done and that was the first time I saw that place ever since we acquired the property. When I walked in, I still remember the infusion of joy that I had in just seeing the layout. A key part of that is, what you were just saying about, sharp edges versus curves because she'd chosen to make all the walls having curved edges rather than sharp edges, including a little bit of a small partition wall that we had, which was also curved as opposed to edge.
Yesterday, I was in our new building in what they call Manhattanville on the Upper West Side here for the Business School of Columbia, which is a little bit an offshoot now of the main campus. It's a big new victory for the school to finally have even richer space and a beautiful building. But again, I noticed that when we got into the elevator and one of the students observed, he said, "Look, professor round, round curves rather than sharp edges to the elevator?" Hopefully, this consciousness is starting to percolate into our times. It's fascinating. Right?
As I see it, what you're doing, Ingrid, is that you're kind of like a being from a higher age, on this topic of joy. You are awakening us to these ground laws and realities that have always existed, but somehow, we weren't paying attention to. You're in a very fine-tuned way, becoming aware of it, discovering these ideas and then offering them up to us so that we also become aware of and start practicing that. I think that's really the history of the evolution of humanity. At some point we are just awakened to things which were always there in the physical world and in a human-to-human exchange, but somehow, we had awoken to the higher laws.
Thank you for that. I don't know if I'm a being from another planet or a different place. It is interesting to me how obvious these things seem, a lot of people were like, "Well, that's obvious." It is obvious, and yet we don't do it. We don't notice it. For me, I'm happy to be this, the speaker of obvious truth. In seriousness, the work is a joy because it is considered an extra, and is seen as so trivial, that it's not a thing that has been taken seriously in a lot of architecture. It's not being taken seriously, certainly not seen as important in the workplace. I think it's going to be increasingly seen as important in the workplace because employers now need to figure out how to get employees to want to come to an office as opposed to it being a thing they have to do. I'm hoping that we'll see more of it in the workplace. Having the science to understand how it's affecting people, is a step that can help and help give some impetus to make some of these changes.
Folks, if you haven't yet come across Ingrid's book, then it has these chapters on these 10 aesthetics that you talk about, energy and abundance, freedom and harmony, play and surprise, transcendence and magic, celebration and renewal.
Ingrid, it's funny you come from a design background. I come from a math background. I was really a math junkie when I was in college and went on for more advanced studies on math. It took me a while to untether myself from what was my first and big love. When I look at these attributes that you have here, this is like why I used to love mathematics. Mathematics was a world of tremendous beauty. The like transcendence and harmony in terms of relationships and patterns and connections between entities was what made it a beautiful world. Less visible to the physical eye, but really a very beautiful world.
It's fascinating. I sometimes feel like maybe all of these disciplines ultimately have the same common core that they come from. They just express themselves in nature in different ways but they have the same shared universal laws behind them, which is beautiful. I really commend you for not going down the path of thinking of the aesthetics purely in physical terms. But first, thinking of them in some kind of an ethereal set of terms that are re-pursuable to almost any enterprise and almost anything to do. Then, you apply them to the physical arena with the very attuned sensibilities you have about what energy really means in nature, what harmony really means in nature. So that's beautiful.
Thank you for that. Yeah, it's interesting as I've lived with them. I guess I've been living with them for more than 12 years. These aesthetics, I have noticed that they can often become values as well. Not just physical descriptors, but they are things that we seek as humans. I think a lot about, for example, abundance mindset versus scarcity mindset and what that means. They're seeing sensorial abundance around you and how that makes us feel. But there's also, thinking of things from a perspective of abundance. I think a lot about companies. Companies that have an abundance mindset and that foster an abundance mindset are so different than companies that foster a scarcity mindset. They are so much more likely to be joyful if they say it's not a scarce number of promotions where everyone is fighting to get to the top or there's this sense that everything is a zero-sum game. It changes the way that you approach the experience. So, I think they can be values as well as aesthetic attributes.
I love that. I've been doing a lot of thought around how there's so much of an emphasis today about looking at the social impact of a business, environmental impact of business and all of that. A lot of that is being put in the language of profits. Actually, you make more money when you have a social impact now because consumers want those brands or investors want to invest in those brands. You know what? I'm not sure if that's the right kind of training to give your people. You do it because it makes more money. When I look at the Steve Jobs of the world, what I notice is the opposite. What they did is, they did that right thing as they saw the world to be and then they just believed that the universe had enough in it, that it would just paw the right opportunities and success and financial outcomes to them and look at an amazing company he created, although he was never really attached to money.
Larry Ellison has this beautiful quote he gives. He talked about how he was never interested in money. But he was really interested in changing the world and making a dent in the universe. Now, he has got the most valuable company in the world created on the basis of that. So, I love this idea of abundance. It is just switching your thinking around, right?
I realized we just have a few minutes to go. I want to highlight an important lesson that I'm learning from your work, which is that while you do really recommend the careful design of spaces and the engagement with the environment that we're living in. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not seeing you prescribe these to be necessarily very big budget kind of investments. I'm seeing you talk about these as something really simple and small adjustments that we can make very mindfully to our spaces, whether they're at home or in the office or beyond that can spark that joy. It's a very universal kind of opportunity that any or all of us have in any situation we are in. Please, talk more about it.
That's right. I mean, I'm talking about paint, I'm talking about plants. These things do not have to be costly. They are things that anyone can do. I think, instead of attaching it to objects and saying, you need to buy this sofa or this coffee table, it can turn the crafting of your environment into a really creative and generative act. If you wanted to bring more circles into your space, how could you do it? Well, you could do it with lamps. You could paint them; you could draw them. You could cut them out of paper or put decals on it. There are so many different ways you can achieve this and it doesn't have to be an expensive or time-consuming endeavor to create a little bit more joy in your surroundings. You probably have a lot of things already in your home, in your space, in your office to do some of these things. It's really just about pulling them out of closets and putting them on display.
How beautiful! My favorite exemplar of what you have been educating us on is Gaudi in Barcelona and all his beautiful work. The homes he designed, the Park Guell he designed. I have no doubt that you have an appreciation for that as well. Tell me how you feel about Gaudi and I want to ask you, you've got some beautiful examples in your book of how this is playing out in the real world. It may not be as publicly out there, but if you look and you find, you've done a wonderful job of that. You'll see these pockets of really exemplary expression of this joyful spirit in the conscious design of public spaces and private spaces and things. Gaudi is my favorite, but I've come to know of some other beautiful examples through you. Who's your favorite and what are those?
Well, I love Gaudi. Actually, I think it's interesting. A lot of people think that the root of the word gaudy is from Gaudi, but in fact, it comes from the Latin Gaudere, which means to rejoice. For something to be gaudy, for something to be a little bit over the top is synonymous with to make it joyful. I think sometimes that sense of abundance, we hold ourselves back because we think it won't be tasteful, but in fact, it is associated in a very basic way in the English language with joy.
Favorite creators of joy? The one who just popped to mind for me was Yayoi Kusama. She is an artist. Her public art is always about this sense of abundance, this creation of abundance. Whether it's an object like a pumpkin that she inserts into the space or these rooms she creates with dots for children and people can just move them all around and create these joyous environments. For me, she would be the one near the top.
Wonderful! Thank you for that. I also want to commend you and highlight to our listeners, that while we have been emphasizing a lot of the visual aspects of joy stimulus, you have so much more that you talked about as well as other small little ornaments, things that we can do and engage in, in our workplace and in our homes to bring more joy. We've started to document some of those because, I've actually collaborated with my wife to say that, this year, one of our goals for our Mentora Institute is going to be to bring a more conscious expression of joy into our interactions and things. In addition to a space related and print related, you also talk about language-oriented ways to not just create more of that sensibility of joy, certain small events that one can do on celebration and appreciation and beyond and just certain exercises and discipline of the mind as well. This is just my way of highlighting to our audience that there's a lot more to this than meets the eye in the confines of the conversation we've had. But kudos, for looking at this very powerful quest for joy through all these different lenses.
Thank you for that.
To bring this all to combination, I want to go back to a point I made at the very beginning of this as to how much joy I got from just discovering your work, discovering your book and how it relates to a quest that has been very core to me from a very early age. In fact, in India, where I grew up, one of the names or definitions of God is what they call Satchitananda, which means infinite ever new joy. I just fell in love with that when I first encountered it. My purpose in life is to explore, understand and pursue that idea, that a fusion with the state of ever new, ever conscious, infinite bliss. Joy is in fact, a right that all of us have as human beings. My spiritual teacher, Yogananda, has this quote that I want to offer up to you as my little gift from today, which is, he says, "This joy is not an abstract quality of the mind. It is a conscious, self born, self expressed quality of the spirit."
Beautiful.
I was. I was very happy to also mention something almost similar when you talked about how joy is always a part of who we are. It's something that we just need to activate and express. Perhaps the last little message that I want to invite you to offer up to everyone today is that, as you've so thoughtfully highlighted, we are living through a challenging time in human history and there is a fair amount of struggle that so many have faced and others have had to just support those who have been in struggle. At a time like this, is there a role for joy? When we think about the mental health and other challenges that we are facing as a society to help alleviating that pathway is the pursuit of joy.
I think absolutely. We have to be careful that we're not doing it in a forced way, right? This idea of toxic positivity where we force ourselves to be happy or we don't allow others to experience sadness. We have to acknowledge the joy as something that lives alongside these difficult emotions. It's not something we can force. At the same time, the nature of our emotions is that we can and we often do feel these little moments of joy, even in hard times. And if we allow ourselves to think, oh, it's a hard time, I'm not going to find any joy to overshadow that, then it will be really hard to notice and capture them. I think it's an exercise of remembering that joy is part of our resilience and allowing ourselves little things, little joys and really recognizing that they're not trivial, they're not throwaway, they're actually really important to helping us get through this time.
Thank you. In closing, final thought. I know I'm extending myself, but there is a free resource out there for all of us that you have talked about so thoughtfully. That's nature. The power, grandeur and inspirational impact and joyful catalysts that nature can be for us. Even in a moment like what we're living through today, how many people just find their place and space where they can connect with something that just is a gift from planet Earth to us everywhere, right? Can you speak to that moment?
All of the aesthetics of joy are derived in some way from nature. That was our ancestral environment. That's been there for millions of years. For 80,000 years we lived in and our ancestors for many years before that lived in this continuous environment of nature. That is, I think, what our senses are optimally tuned for. It's what our attention is optimally tuned for, for sure. There are studies on something called attention restoration theory. When we go out into nature, if our willpower is depleted, if our ability to focus is depleted, it restores it just by being out in nature for as little as 15 minutes. We know that there's a biological relationship between nature and our minds because they evolved in such close touch. Things like birdsong, that's an easy way to bring it in. If you have a brown thumb and you aren't able to keep such lush and gorgeous plants alive or you worry about your ability to do that, birdsong is another way. They've been shown to relieve pain and improve focus in different situations.
Even if you don't live near nature and it's harder to get access to it, there is always some form of it that you can access that can bring you a little joy and a little peace.
Wonderful! Thank you for that. For those of us who are actually watching more than just even listening to Ingrid, I want to highlight to you that, as your house is going through remodeling, as I understand, look thoughtful Ingrid you are with the ladder that you have put behind you is giving us so much joy and in some way is matching the outfit that you have. It's beautiful.
I'm just tempted to draw one last idea from you for our audience. If you had to just give us like one practical tip to go out and do something to just experiment with this idea of consciously crafting joy in our life today, what might that be?
Really simple. I call it joy spotting. It's going out into your surroundings with an eye toward looking for joy. You don't have to know all the aesthetics of joy. You don't have to have anything specific in mind. You can do it while you're walking your dog or just taking a walk around the block. Just tune your senses and start to notice. What do you see that brings you joy? Strangely, it might be an orange parking cone. You might think that's nice in this bleak winter landscape to be able to see this bright pop of color and then see what happens next, maybe the light is doing something interesting that brings you a little lift. Maybe, you see confetti leftover from a celebration. In a city, the possibilities are endless. If you're out in nature, often it's quieter, more subtle. But I think just even if it's 15 minutes, take your time to notice that there are things in your surroundings that can give you joy. We call that joy spotting.
If you see something, you can always hashtag it, joy spotting. I think there are more than 80,000 joy spotting posts on Instagram right now. One of the things about joy is that when we share it, it actually heightens our own joy, we get more joy out of sharing. Whether you text it to a friend or share it more publicly, notice some joy and then go, share it.
Well, on that measure, you must be one of the most joyful people in the world because you've done so much here and years past.
Besides this beautiful family moment having Graham and raising him, what's your big dream in life at this stage with where you are with this luminous work?
Thank you for that. I think for me, it's about helping more people become aware of the fact that joy is accessible to them. As I've worked with people around this, spoken to people and had conversations with readers, especially creative people, I think there's a lot of work to undo. Whether that's in our environment or in ourselves to undo this idea that we unconsciously don't believe we deserve joy, we don't believe that certain others deserve joy. I think that is the big work. That's what I'm focused on now. There's an individual piece to that helping individuals unlearn their own biases around joy. There is also the societal piece around that.
For me, the most joy I get is when other creatives take this work and they say, "I did this thing. I changed this thing at the school where I teach or I got the doctor I work for to change his waiting room." They're small things, but they matter. And of course, when large organizations take it on, that's amazing too. But I think a lot of this work really happens at the hands of individuals.
So true. So wonderful. Folks, I encourage you to go out and be this kind of a change maker. Infuse yourself with joy. Go ahead and spot joy that is around you. Help serve and support others in getting sparks of joy.
Let's give a big round of applause and a big thank you and wish Ingrid a whole lot of joy in your work and your life ahead. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you so much.
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