3 ways to create joy when living sucks

life sucks and you still deserve to experience joy

Jul 15, 2024

This listicle is gonna sound like bullshit if your life REALLY sucks. Would it still help? Maybe 🤷🏾 but if your life really sucks and you’re really struggling, you may need help from a mental health care professional. This listicle is not a substitute for the advice of a licensed medical professional.

Living sucks.

I mean, living under the toe of capitalism and patriarchy sucks.

We work too hard for too little money. There are multiple genocides happening. Climate change is broiling us alive. Our ecosystems are collapsing. And we just have to go to work and do our silly little jobs.

How the FUCK are we supposed to find joy in all this? Should we even find joy while this is going on?

Don’t ask me about that one.

How about we focus on what we can do?

While all of this is going on, it’s not a bad idea to have some joy. I think that it’s a moment of rest and reprieve so that you can keep up dismantling the system. (Bun dong Babylon ✊🏾)

If your life especially sucks, then it might be even harder to find joys. Trust me, I know how that is. I have chronically low levels of serotonin in my brain 🙃

These are some ways I create joy in my life.

Notice I said ‘create’ and not ‘find’. We’re so used to being passive participants in our lives — we’re always told what to do (or just forced to do) things, and we’re tired from doing things all the time.

I urge you to take some time and energy to be a more active participant in your life, your self care, your joy. It really matters that you take time for yourself in a world as ridiculous as this one.

These joys I create are low lift (for me). I encourage you to adjust these to suit you.

These joys might seem too small to even matter, but I promise you they do 💜

1️⃣ make/eat a tasty meal

Humans don’t photosynthesize (missed opportunity tbh), so we gotta eat.

Most fitness bros will tell you that food is fuel and you shouldn’t think about it too much. And like… Yes, and if you’re culturally diverse like me, food is comfort, safety, family, warmth.

Food for me is also ritual, magic, science, fun.

You know what you could use when you’re sad? At least the comfort and fun bits.

Of course food is fuel, and you’re probably gonna feel physically better if you’re hungry.

But the ritual of preparation, the magic of bringing it all together, and the comfort and warmth of having a belly full of delicious food goes real far to lift my spirits and bring me joy.

2️⃣ read fiction

I feel like people read non-fiction books like self-help and biographies to make themselves smarter.

(If that’s you, then cool. No shade ⛱️)

Personally, I love fiction. Being able to disappear into a book for hours and forget about reality is so much fun. Getting to focus on this story and these people, imagination running wild as you read.

I’m getting goosebumps just writing about it!

The last book I read that had me hooked from start to finish was Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. I felt like I was participating in these stories about victory and triumph against all odds.

That’s isn’t to say that I found it exactly motivational or inspirational, but it’s a way to get out of myself and focus on something outside of me.

And it’s super low-lift fun that works even better if I’m sat outside on my porch!

3️⃣ declutter one surface (literally just one)

Sometimes, my brain feels so chaotic that my environment starts to look like it too. Clothes on the chairdrobe, clean laundry in baskets, shoes all over the room, just stuff on my dresser.

It sends me crazy sometimes. When I get like that, I pick one surface to declutter.

Just one.

My dresser, my desk, or my nightstand, I put away the stuff that doesn’t live there, rearrange what does, then wipe everything down.

Again, something about getting outside of myself just makes me feel brighter. And what neurodivergent person doesn’t love to successfully complete a task? ✅

Creating joy in my life sometimes means doing something huge (like having more money amirite), but doing many, smaller things also matters and makes a difference.

If can be hard to remember them all, and honestly when I started writing this I almost couldn’t come up with 3 LOL. I had to create a journal to record all of the things I do to create joy in my life so that I wouldn’t forget.