Dopamine-ing ourselves dilutes the real power of joy

Ditch being happy all the time.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

Cartoon character Joy looks up with arms held open.

Inside Out's Joy.

Disney.

As I write this, I’m looking out of my window at endless grey. It has been raining almost constantly for several days. The garden is waterlogged, the apples are going mouldy on the tree and my dog, who has just come in, is sitting next to me and smelling of, well, wet dog. And it all looks pretty gloomy.

One of my most climbed upon soap boxes is the oppressive myth of our age/western culture that we are all supposed to be happy all the time. If we’re not living our best life and posting photos of our happiness on social media, then shame on us. There seems to be a socially acceptable dopamine addiction running rampant – each swipe, like and tweet feeding our habit.

As someone who lives with the albatross of depression weighing constantly around my neck, I find this compulsory pursuit of very public happiness somewhat trying. And call me Eeyore if you will, but I’d like to point out that sometimes it rains and there isn’t a rainbow. Just puddles.

There is a place for sorrow and disappointment and frustration in real life, and dopamine-ing ourselves out of those experiences dilutes the real power of joy.

I haven’t watched the new Inside Out film yet (See Henna Cundill’s great article on it) but the first one is a firm family favourite. It’s so deeply insightful and brilliantly unDisney. For anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, it’s a Disney animation of the adventures of the five core emotions (Fear, Anger, Joy, Disgust and Sadness) belonging to a young girl coping with moving with her parents to live in a new city.

Happiness is candy floss and joy is a strong cup of tea.

The main character is Joy. And she’s all about the happy. She refuses to allow Riley (the girl whose emotions they are) to be anything but happy. And that’s the set-up of the film. Joy fighting against the odds to keep Riley happy, even when she’s going through some really tough life stuff. And by the end of the film, it’s Joy who has grown because she recognises that Sadness has an important role in Riley’s life and that when Sadness takes the lead, Joy can join in, honestly, unsentimentally and sincerely.

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed seeing Joy’s bouncy, oppressive positivity being acknowledged as really annoying.

The real strength of the film is that Joy grows from a character that I would call Happy into real Joy. Because, based on no good reasons at all, I have always thought of Joy as a more mature relative to happiness. To me, happiness is lighter, frothier and joy has greater depth and robustness. Happiness is candy floss and joy is a strong cup of tea. Happiness is still naïve while joy has been around the block a few times yet still hangs in there. Happiness is a powerful feeling that eclipses all else. Joy is mature enough to be in the same room as Sadness.

You see, I also think of joy as a choice, not just a happy feeling. Like thousands of other people, I have benefited hugely from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) which says that while you can’t choose your feelings, you can choose your thoughts. And it turns out that our feelings are reactions to our thoughts, not the other way around.

For instance, if you are woken up in the middle of the night by a loud crash, how would you feel? If you feel scared, it’s probably because your first thought is that a burglar has broken into your home. If you turn over and go back to sleep, it’s probably because you know that the cat has knocked something off the kitchen table, again. Our feelings come after our thoughts, not the other way around. Which changes everything.

We can’t tell ourselves to be happy, to be excited, to not be afraid. But we can choose our thoughts, what we allow to dwell in our minds. The pursuit of happiness then becomes about training the mind rather than mindlessly reaching for the next “feel good” dopamine hit.

Joy grows up. She starts out bubblegum-happy-at-all-costs-annoying. And she matures into someone who’s patient and compassionate and strong.

CBT rose to fame, as it were, during the latter years of the twentieth century and more recently, a lot of research has gone into the correlation of CBT within diverse religious frameworks, including Judaism, Taoism and predominantly, Christianity. The evidence suggests that religious belief has considerable positive impact on mental well-being and psychology. It seems that there is real joy to be found in the Unseen.

And I don’t think that’s a surprise. The Bible is full of CBT once you start looking for it. For example, St Paul wrote a letter to a church in Philippi, while he was chained up in a prison cell. I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t Insta-ready yet he says (italicised translation my own) "I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of living my best life in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.” Isn’t that a secret we’d all like to learn? How to have real joy that is completely independent from our circumstances?

St Paul is not saying don’t worry, be happy. He isn’t saying pretend everything is ok, put your head in the sand and act as if you haven’t a care in the world. He is far more realistic than that. He knows better than most people that real life is very complicated and often very painful. He’s saying that whatever our circumstances, we have a choice. A choice to let ourselves drown in anxiety and sorrow or to fill our minds with, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” He is of course talking about the goodness and faithfulness of God and what pours out as a result of God’s lovingkindness. When I fill my mind, when I choose to think about such things, it means there is less room for despair and Joy has the space to dance.

And this is why I think Inside Out is so good. Joy grows up. She starts out bubblegum-happy-at-all-costs-annoying. And she matures into someone who’s patient and compassionate and strong. Joy can hold you while you give airtime to Sadness, Disgust, Fear and even Anger. And she’s there to celebrate and commiserate with you when that’s done. This may not meet the need for a party-popper-emoji-style happiness, but I for one say, Yes, please, can I have some of that?

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Leading

Politics

12 September 2024

4 min read

From Blair and Britpop to Starmer and the Oasis comeback: why character, not personality, matters

We get both the leaders and entertainers we deserve.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Tony Blair talks to a member of Oasis at a reception.

Number 10.

Last time we had a new Labour prime minister, there were no Partygate fears in Number 10. Quite the opposite. Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia project threw its front door open to the likes of Britpop overlord Noel Gallagher of Oasis at a bash in 1997. Inheriting a rising economy, things for New Labour, as well as for Oasis, could only get better.

This time around, Sir Keir Starmer has “tough decisions” to make, such as trying to deny a universal winter fuel allowance to most pensioners. Blair arguably never had a really tough decision to make, until his Iraq war nemesis. Since then, Oasis has turned into an unacceptable face of capitalism, as the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next year turns into a Ticketmaster greed-fest of “dynamic pricing”. Diabolical pricing, more like.

Starmer and Blair both aspired to usher in an era of change and renewal. The similarity of their circumstances ends there. Nearly 30 years on, Starmer is in a different world. And the transformation of Oasis is totemic of that – from the joys of Britpop to the horrors of rip-off.

That times change is axiomatic. The nineties had busts and booms; the UK’s Black Wednesday currency crisis was of the former, the snarky underclass anthems of Oasis a paradigm of the latter. Now, in the 2020s, there are only busts. Like the note left in the Treasury drawer in 2010 joked, there really is no money left now. Except, apparently, for Oasis.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him.

An engaging question arises as to how the two Labour PMs were and are equipped spiritually for the times in which they lead. The spiritual state of Oasis is a linked matter, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Blair’s government famously didn’t “do God”, though it turned out he did privately, converting to his wife’s Roman Catholicism almost immediately after leaving office in 2007. Perhaps he had a priest hole in the family flat above Number 11. He consistently denied claims that he prayed with American president George W. Bush before or during the Iraq war.

Starmer doesn’t do God rather more formally, as a self-declared atheist. We can conclude that prayer is not a resource that he needs as he faces a more challenging immediate political future than Blair’s early days as PM. I only wish Starmer would appear in a T-shirt with the slogan “No Prayer, Like Blair”.

Arguably the spiritual life doesn’t matter for any leader. The job of PM is all about simple competence, mostly in money management. To paraphrase the pithy quip from Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign (on which Blair’s so strategically relied), it’s all about the economy, stupid.

So the worship is of mammon rather than God. Here the current and former PMs might care to track the career trajectory of the two Lords Gallagher of Oasis from Blair to Starmer. In 1997, they were in their pomp as authentic Mancunian working-class heroes. Today, the brothers have to make up and go back on the road to subsidise Noel’s £20million divorce settlement. A rather different demographic.

There’s perhaps no great political lesson there for political leaders, but it’s almost Faustian in its scope. See what happens when you bank only with mammon.

Which brings us to the false idols of politics. Since personality, rather than policy, became the political trump card it’s inevitable that we would get Trump. Or someone like him. It doesn’t matter, to his core vote, what he’s done or what he’s incapable of doing, Only who he is. He’s an idol, a cult image, a golden calf. Trump’s bull is sacred, whatever he does.

The UK thankfully hasn’t had one of those yet (though there were warning tremors in Boris Johnson). But it’s telling that Blair is said to have developed a messianic tendency after his premiership’s early intervention in Kosovo during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the termination of hostilities, crowds there sought to touch his clothes as he passed.

Strange that being touched should make him feel untouchable. But that’s the way of messianics. It can be the same with rock & roll stars. Live music, at its best, can offer a transcendent sense of communion. At its worst, it’s the adoration of stage idols that sends them a little mad. Or mad for it.

Oasis’s Liam Gallagher isn’t in this together with his fans anymore. He’s turned into a Marie Antoinette figure online in response to the ludicrous prices charged to watch him from Ticketmaster. He substitutes “Shut up” and “£100,000 kneeling tickets” for “Let them eat cake”.

He and his brother are warnings of what can happen in so short a period between the ascendancy of Blair and that of Starmer. True, pop stars aren’t as dangerous as someone such as Trump. But they do show us that we get both the entertainers and the leaders we deserve.