Joy and happiness

Notes on using this guide:

This guide was written in preparation for facilitating a Climate Conversation. It contains background information and ideas for conversation starters. I have written it out as a script, and it can be used that way, but I prefer short bullet points as prompts.

I produce more conversation starters around a topic than I plan to use because I never know what will come out of the conversation. Often something comes up in the first part that feels right to explore further, and, when that happens, we go with the flow. Sometimes a question or idea doesn’t ‘work’, if that happens we move on to a different one.

Introduction

“When I started reading and thinking about joy and happiness and the climate crisis I discovered several ways to explore the topic, and more questions than we can think about in one meeting. So we’ll start with an open question for the first part of our conversation, then choose where to go from there.”

What do we mean by happiness?

“Happiness is a word we use all the time, and we assume that we are all talking about the same thing. However, while humans may share a set of basic emotions, there’s variation too in different times and places. In one episode of their podcast Panu and Thomas Doherty talk about how different ‘flavours’ of happiness can be found. Words translated as happiness may have different roots or associations in the original language. For example, they say in China there is a word xingfu, that implies luck and having just the right amount of something. In Finnish the word onnellisus has the same root as the word for luck.

“So, we’ll start our conversation by thinking about what happens means to us. We’ll be trying to put the abstract idea of happiness into words, rather than describing what makes us happy. This kind of abstract thinking isn’t easy, and some of us (maybe all of us) might not enjoy it or find it impossible. If that happens, don’t worry. We can find our way into the topic with a different question. Remember the principles of peer support mean it’s okay to be ourselves and to choose how we engage. It’s perfectly valid, and helpful, to say if a question leaves you black or puzzled.

“I think it’s worth trying to start out by defining happiness because these kinds of questions can be useful:

• They can help us understand each other. We might have different ideas about what happiness is, and a conversation is much easier when we know what each other means.
• Although we share a language, we live in slightly different social worlds, there’s an opportunity to learn about someone else’s perspective.
• There are many things we take for granted. When we live in the same culture and share the same language, many of our ideas and assumptions are hidden from view because we never have to explain them to each other.
• Trying to put into words something we take for granted can bring some of our own hidden assumptions and beliefs to light – which makes for an interesting conversation later.

In short, I think this question has the potential to help us understand ourselves, our culture, and each other. Alternatively, it might trigger questions or ideas we want to explore.”

Conversation starter: “What is happiness to us?”

Follow-up question: What about joy and fun? Can we bundle them together or are they too different?

Allow everyone a few minutes to think about the question. Offer paper and pens. Be prepared to offer your help to people who might need adaptations for literacy, language or disability. Don’t be concerned about puzzled faces or if nothing seems to be happening. It can take a little time and a few minutes of silence feels like a long time when you’re facilitating.

After a few minutes check if the group would like more time. When they are ready act as notetaker for the group using a whiteboard or large piece of paper. Ask each person to describe their thoughts in turn, while the rest of the group listens.

When each person has had an opportunity to speak, review what is on the board together and respond to the ideas. Add new ideas to the board.

Fun, happiness, joy and pleasure as climate emotions

“It’s interesting that fun and joy don’t appear in the wheel of climate emotions. Joy and pleasure do appear in Panu Pihkalas’s taxonomy of climate emotions¹A taxonomy is a list of categories, like one biologists use to divide animals into different families and species. Dr Panu Pihkala has made a similar collection, sorting all the climate emotions into groups of related emotions.. We’re used to talking about ‘climate grief’ and ‘climate anxiety’. Is there such a thing as ‘climate happiness’ or climate joy’?”

Other ideas for conversation starters

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Panu Pihkala and Thomas Doherty for making the Climate Change and Happiness podcast available. Episode 19 from season 2 was the inspiration for some of the ideas and questions in this guide.

The Climate Emotions Wheel is published under a Creative Commons licence by the Climate Mental Health Network.

Thanks to Dr Panu Pihkala and Joseph Dodds for their open-access research papers. Ideas for how joy relates to the climate crisis, and what can get in the way of making space for joy came from these two papers²I didn’t do a thorough search of the research on this topic. I only looked for examples in a couple of papers to help our conversation..

Sources

Dodds, Joseph. “Dancing at the End of the World? Psychoanalysis, Climate Change and Joy.” The Journal of Analytical Psychology 67 (November 1, 2022): 1257–69.

Doherty, Thomas, and Panu Pihkala. “Season 2, Episode 19: Considering Happiness and What It Should Mean for You.” Climate Change and Happiness. Accessed August 28, 2024.

Notes

• 1
  A taxonomy is a list of categories, like one biologists use to divide animals into different families and species. Dr Panu Pihkala has made a similar collection, sorting all the climate emotions into groups of related emotions.
• 2
  I didn’t do a thorough search of the research on this topic. I only looked for examples in a couple of papers to help our conversation.