This week I don't want to talk about the science of joy, or even about branding. I want to talk about the joy of feeling seen.
My life — or the multiverse thereof — has usually changed because of a book. The deepest first encounter I had with that was the day The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy landed in my hands, at the tender age of thirteen. From the first sentence I knew I'd never read anything like it: that deep ideas and profound insight could be served as a joke, and be no less deep for it.
Every Adams line does this for me. You feel seen, and somehow uplifted, even when the realization is genuinely dark. Take apart a cat to see how it works, he wrote, and the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. It's funny, and it's also the whole case against pulling living things apart to understand them. You laugh before you've decided whether to agree.
So this week, no framework. Just a question. Think back to your own moment of joy, in the full sense of the word — the kind that left you a little changed. Was it a book? A hug? Something that happened to you once and never quite left?
Originally published in The Joy Dividend on LinkedIn.