Joy Can Survive Uncertainty Without Turning Loss Into Gain

Kate Bowler’s account of joy begins with a refusal of the bargain American optimism often offers: suffer correctly, interpret the loss correctly, become stronger, and eventually the story will pay out. Bowler, a Duke professor of religious history and author of Joyful, Anyway, described that bargain as a cousin of the prosperity gospel she has spent her academic life studying — the belief that God wants people to have health, wealth, and happiness, and that anything blocking those outcomes is only a temporary setback for people with the right kind of faith.

Bowler’s interest began, as she told it, with a Canadian megachurch she initially mistook for a factory. The congregation had just celebrated Pastor Appreciation Day by giving money to a pastor who bought a motorcycle and drove it around on stage. Bowler, raised among Mennonites committed to pacifism, simplicity, and “furniture building,” thought the spectacle had to be “for Americans.” It was not. It became the start of her scholarly obsession with how prosperity theology travels.

The prosperity gospel, in Bowler’s account, is not only a doctrine inside certain churches. It is part of a wider cultural machinery for explaining why some people flourish and others do not. She traced one strand to New Thought, a late-19th-century movement that treated the mind as “a powerful spiritual incubator” and taught that rightly harnessed thought and spoken words could help bring desired realities into being. That idea, she said, has repeatedly rebranded itself: through self-help, Pentecostalism, Norman Vincent Peale’s “power of positive thinking,” and now TikTok-era manifesting.

Laurie Santos connected Bowler’s account to the psychology of goal pursuit. Santos said she teaches Yale students evidence that manifesting does not work psychologically and can make people less likely to achieve their goals. The resistance she gets from students, she said, is intense: they ask whether manifesting might work if done correctly, or whether a vision board changes the equation. Bowler’s joke was that Gen Z “ruined” and remade her scholarly life by reviving the thing she had studied in older forms.

The more serious point is that optimism can become an explanation for suffering that places the moral burden on the sufferer. Santos framed the danger plainly: if health and happiness are unlocked by faith, effort, or the right mindset, then illness and unhappiness can be read as signs that someone has failed to try, believe, or perform gratitude properly. Bowler described that structure as a theodicy — an explanation for why bad things happen.

That question became personal after Bowler’s own life appeared, from the outside, to conform to the “hashtag blessed” narrative she had been analyzing. She had married her high-school sweetheart, become a professor young in a brutally competitive field, and had a baby. Then came chronic pain that left her unable to use her arms just as her work required writing books. After that came stomach pain, repeated emergency room visits, and dismissals that attributed her symptoms to stress or sent her home with Pepto-Bismol. When she insisted on another scan, she said, the next day she received a call in her office: stage four colon cancer. She was told to go to the hospital immediately.

“It was like an avalanche,” Bowler said. “It was like the end of a whole world that I really loved.”

At first, she tried to perform the expected story: the woman who gets cancer and is grateful for the lessons. But the actual experience was built around two-month increments. She entered a clinical trial in which responding to a drug meant another two months. Two months became Christmas, then three-month scans, then six-month scans, then the strange possibility that chronic cancer might become a long-term condition. Nearly ten years out, she described survival not as a clean triumph but as “a slow unveiling” and “a renegotiation with time and what we think is possible.”

The expected movie ending — survive, ring the bell, walk out, roll credits — did not match what happened. When tragedy was urgent, Bowler said, everything appeared in bright colors. She fell in love with the world again and stopped sitting through faculty meetings because she believed she had no time for them. But when life became Tuesday again, the question returned: how does one live after having thought life was ending?

The difficulty was not only gratitude for surviving. It was the pressure to become the correct kind of survivor. Bowler described feeling like a “bad cancer patient,” especially a bad woman, if she returned to ordinary irritations, gossip, waste, social media, or wanting anything at all. If her family could appear in a Christmas-card photo, she said, surely she should “never want again.” She also named the spiritual version of the same pressure: a sense that failing to appreciate survival might make her a bad Christian or a bad person.

That is where Bowler’s critique of cultural optimism and her personal experience meet. She said she is invested in “lovingly deconstructing” cultural myths because she is so susceptible to them. If someone tells her to be grateful, she starts a gratitude journal. Santos added a qualification from positive psychology: gratitude interventions can help many people, but they require genuine feeling, become ineffective when rote, do not work for everyone, and are not suited to people in catastrophic circumstances in the same way they might help “the average person on a Thursday” who has not just received a stage four diagnosis.

The tension between suffering and meaning became sharpest around the idea of post-traumatic growth. Laurie Santos noted that positive psychology distinguishes post-traumatic stress from post-traumatic growth and has found evidence that people can learn from terrible experiences, often about social connection. She offered, carefully, that Kate Bowler herself seemed in some sense changed for the better.

Bowler rejected the word “better.”

That answer is central to Bowler’s distinction. She did not deny that “treasures” can be found in the dark, or that “beautiful hopeful things” may be discovered only in the crucible of great difficulty. But she separated that from the packaged account that appears at the end of celebrity interviews: the ordeal made me who I am, I am stronger now, looking back I am grateful.

Bowler argued that the effort to create an accounting system around suffering fails because the loss is not merely transactional. The vulnerability of life includes things bottoming out and then bottoming out again; it includes discovering that one requires far more interdependence than one’s dignity wanted. Accounting language, in her view, cannot reach the existential story people need when they are trying to say what remains beautiful if they cannot honestly say that things are better.

Her point leaves room for hope, but not for compulsory uplift. Bowler’s language preserves meaning, beauty, connection, and even joy, while refusing the claim that suffering must improve the ledger. The stronger cultural version — tragedy as guaranteed improvement — can become another pressure on the person who remains injured, angry, frightened, or diminished.

Santos later connected this to what she calls toxic positivity: the pathologizing of negative emotion and the pressure to translate every painful feeling into a happiness practice. Bowler quoted psychologist Lisa Damour’s idea that mental health means “feeling what is appropriate.” She found that framing liberating because it lets reality be named without moral panic. “I am sad because this was devastating. I am angry because this was enraging,” Bowler said. That restored to her “a sense of being a reliable narrator of my own life.”

Santos grounded the same point in evolutionary psychology. Sadness in the face of catastrophe is not a defect; overwhelm when there is too much on one’s plate is not a character failure. Pain, like the pain of touching a hot stove, is a signal that something needs to change. Negative emotions are informative. If they are immediately banished in favor of a happiness to-do list, something important is lost.

Bowler added another reason people try to suppress their pain: they know sadness costs other people. Seeing pain in one’s children makes a person want to remove it; being in pain creates a circle of anxious, worried people. In illness or undoing, which is expensive, exhausting, chronic, and often limping rather than dramatic, Bowler said one of the first deeply wrong beliefs she absorbed was that bad things had not merely happened to her — she herself had become “the bad thing.”

Bowler’s account ties that belief back to the social pressure around pain. If pain is treated primarily as a problem to be managed, bright-sided, converted into gratitude, or converted into growth, then the person in pain can begin to feel like the contaminant. Bowler’s answer is not to deny suffering its force but to stop requiring it to justify itself.

Kate Bowler gives the name “the ache” to a persistent human restlessness that is neither simple sadness nor ordinary dissatisfaction. She described it as “bittersweet longing,” a “restless missing” for something one wants and cannot seem to find. It is not quite malaise, she said, because it has “a restless sweetness.”

To understand it, Bowler went looking for theological, historical, psychological, and musical language. She pointed to the blues in African American tradition: “There are some truths we can only tell about ourselves in a minor key. You know, it’s still a song.” She cited the Portuguese word saudade and Friedrich Schiller’s use of Sehnsucht, a German term for bittersweet longing. Each helped her think about incompleteness without treating it as a failure.

Bowler said she had been taught, in a Christian framework, that incompleteness was a kind of spiritual hole that would be filled if one were sufficiently good and faithful. But she considered herself “pretty Jesusy” and did not experience “miraculous completion all the live long day.” So she searched for another framework.

A conversation with Ron Rolheiser, a professor and priest who also had advanced cancer, helped. Bowler called him with a worry: she did not know how to describe restless incompleteness in a way that did not sound like failing to be grateful or faithful. His response, as she recounted it, began with a wry refusal to exempt her from ordinary human trouble: there might be something wrong with her specifically, but it was likely that the thing she felt was wrong with her was the same thing wrong with all of us. We are born crying, there is a lot of crying in the middle, and there is a lot at the end.

Rolheiser offered two ways to understand that hunger. One is the “Hungry Hungry Hippos” version: more, more, more; endless consumption; the voracious capitalist self-making project; the midlife-crisis assumption that some purchase, achievement, or upgrade will solve the problem. The other is to see restlessness as having a holy quality — not simply incompleteness, but aliveness that can be directed.

That distinction led into Bowler’s critique of the modern impulse to turn the self into a project. Work can soften the ache because it supplies purpose, structure, competence, and distraction. Laurie Santos admitted that when she feels existential angst, she refreshes her inbox even if she checked it 42 seconds earlier, hoping for proof of worth or a task that will distract her for 45 minutes until the ache returns.

Bowler understands the attraction. Work, she said, made her a feminist by giving her a boundary; it made her more than a person endlessly fed into other people’s needs. During cancer treatment, work gave her agency when illness threatened to eclipse her. She described spending every Wednesday for two years in an Atlanta hospital and deciding to make it also a workspace. While researching televangelism and women televangelists, she invited megachurch women to the hospital and interviewed them from behind a curtain. “Tell me everything,” she would say, “but like, quickly!” It looked alarming, she said, because it was. But it gave her purpose.

The problem is that work can also feed “this endless buzzy churn” in which a person cannot simply be loved but must constantly earn worth and place. It prevents a person from sitting with the pain itself. The ache is quieted, not understood.

Santos extended the critique to wellness technologies, apps, optimization routines, and AI-shaped promises that some tool might finally solve human incompleteness. Bowler described the “PUMAs” she meets at dinners: very fit men in puffy vests with wearables, optimizing things she did not know could be optimized. They “happy-max” and “life-max.” They turn mornings into routines and memories with children into investments. “I only will invest core memories with their kids,” Bowler said, imitating the type. Her response: “But what about the rest of the time?”

Bowler said she remembered a figure around $1.2 trillion going into the American wellness industry, and used it as an index of the desire to put algorithms and metrics around hunger and want. The underlying pattern she described was an “everything is possible-ism” that leaves out caregiving, deferred careers, abandoned dreams, and the thousand realities that do not fit an endless-progress narrative. Borrowing from Charles Taylor, she framed this as one of modernity’s great diseases: “How did we stop being people and start becoming projects?”

The argument is not that routines, work, or health practices are useless. It is that they become distortions when they promise to eliminate the ache. Bowler’s account treats longing as part of aliveness, not a defect in need of permanent repair.

Bowler’s book begins, Santos said, from the observation that the modern world has experienced “a global withering in our capacity for joy.” Kate Bowler described the symptoms in terms of a daily encounter with phone-fed apocalypse: microplastics, untested bridges, democratic fissures, family tensions, and a constant sense that everything is one’s responsibility while nothing can be done. In that atmosphere, joy can feel inappropriate. Her shorthand for the objection was: “You want us to be joyful now, in this economy?”

Laurie Santos responded with a summary of research she attributed to Georgetown researcher Konstantin Kushlev. As Santos described it, Kushlev’s studies ask who goes to climate protests or social justice rallies, and suggest that people trying to address terrible conditions in the world often have more bandwidth and experience more positive emotion. Joy, in Santos’s framing, is not necessarily a withdrawal from the world’s pain. It can help sustain engagement with it.

Bowler’s definition of joy is deliberately modest and specific. It is not a utopian life, a perfect family reunion, skydiving, or the restoration of a past self who was thinner, happier, and had more ahead. Joy is “a big, bright, enlivening feeling” and “a moment of temporary wholeness.” It says, briefly, “Yes. Yes, it is so good to be alive.”

One of Bowler’s examples was not grand. She was in her living room and heard her son talking to her father. Her father, she said, had spent much of her life deeply depressed. Now he was best friends with the child Bowler once thought she would never have. They were discussing Winston Churchill and how he felt during the darkest hour. The scene made her laugh with a surge of recognition: “Oh my gosh, isn’t it so good to be alive.”

That kind of joy cannot be engineered on demand. Santos pressed Bowler on the difficulty: a culture of happy-maxing wants to schedule and optimize the conditions for joy, but one cannot reliably produce the conversation between father, son, and Winston Churchill. Bowler’s language around happiness and joy was conversational rather than technical, but the contrast she drew was clear enough: some good feelings depend on context and incremental ease, while joy is more surprising. It sneaks up. It cannot be fixed, engineered, or maxed. She joked that she wished her Oura ring could predict it.

Bowler suggested that a person has to believe in joy “like you used to believe in Santa Claus”: something is coming, not because life is controllable but because people are built with “this unbelievable capacity for it.” We are, in her phrase, “made for joy.”

The preconditions for joy include something counterintuitive: honesty about the life that is. Bowler described making “the list” with her best friend — a list of everything that changed them, scarred them, and that they wished could be different. The point was not to moralize the losses or sweeten the ending with “it made me who I am today.” It was to name the cost. Bowler thinks calcified pain can become a joy blocker, and that believing one’s own story can make it possible to see that a painful part is a chapter rather than the whole book.

The body matters too. Bowler said sadness and sorrow are not joy killers. In her account, one cannot be happy and sad at the same time, but one can be joyful and sad because, as she put it, joy has the ability to engage both dopamine and the stress system. The real joy killers are the conditions that make people “head down and predictable and unsurprisable.” Hyper-optimization may push joy aside precisely because it narrows the possibility of surprise.

Santos brought in the Christian liturgical idea of “ordinary time” — the stretches outside major seasons like Christmas or Easter — as a way of thinking about where joy has to be found. For non-Catholics, she explained, ordinary time is when “there’s no candles or nothing exciting is happening.” Bowler’s point is that this is exactly the terrain: regular time, unspecial time, the life that has not been staged for transcendence.

Bowler named “cousins” of joy that hide there: hope, delight, and gratitude. Hope, in her account, is not denial or prosperity-gospel optimism; it does not pretend everything will be perfect. It “shouts down despair” by saying the terrible thing happened, but might not happen again, and beautiful things may still be in store. It stretches the idea of one’s own goodness into a future one cannot predict.

Delight is more particular. It is not standard-issue or morally heavy. Bowler joked that it is not like “a horrible Mennonite Christmas” where everyone gets tube socks. It lights a person up in their own strange specificity. Santos said delight can feel easier than gratitude because gratitude sometimes becomes weighty — “I am so grateful for my career” — while delight can be as ordinary as passing a car and seeing someone rocking out to Mötley Crüe. Bowler agreed that delight participates in a story a person tells about the self: whatever has happened, one can still be the kind of person who is lit up, surprised by a laugh, and able to find “the small yes” when the impulse is to say no.

Joy, then, is not a solution to uncertainty. It is a capacity that remains compatible with uncertainty, sadness, and unfinishedness.

The audience questions sharpened the difference between joy and other heightened states. One question concerned “joy maxing” in the context of a child’s athletic pursuits: a child receives an adrenaline hit from a large achievement or risk, then comes back needing more. The question asked where ordinary behavior, rather than risk-seeking behavior, fits within the Happiness Lab’s account.

Kate Bowler distinguished joy from emotional relatives such as elation and bliss. Bliss, she said, can be “self-erasing.” Joy is embodied and temporary, but it is also more than a positive emotion. It is a story about one’s own goodness. In a world where people can feel replaceable, joy reminds them that the “bizarre specificity” of who they are is itself a delight.

That answer matters because it keeps joy from becoming just another peak experience to chase. The moment of joy passes. Bowler said the feeling that follows can be wistful, a return to the ordinary ache, which she described as unfixable except, jokingly, at the snack tent. The point was not to deny the letdown but to recognize it as part of the structure of human experience.

Laurie Santos connected that return to hedonic adaptationThe tendency for people to return toward an emotional baseline after positive or negative changes.. After a joyful moment, one may return to dinner, dishes, email, or baseline. Santos said people often react to that negatively, but she framed it as a “beautiful feature of human psychology” if one can notice it: joy arrives, baseline returns, and joy can return again.

Santos also placed joy near emotions that are not cleanly positive or negative. Awe was her example. At Aspen, she said, one could walk outside and look at the mountains and feel wonder about something larger than oneself. But awe is not simply pleasant. It also includes smallness and finitude; its bodily signs can include goosebumps, which Santos described as a fear response. She said she has been “nerding out” about emotions that refuse strict categories because they show that the mind has states in which good and bad are entangled rather than neatly separated.

That scientific framing fits Bowler’s account of joy as compatible with sorrow. The emotional life at stake here is not a sorting exercise in which positive states are kept and negative states are eliminated. Joy, awe, wistfulness, grief, delight, and longing can overlap. The ache can follow joy without invalidating it.

A second audience question asked why religion and spirituality did not appear more explicitly in Kate Bowler’s practical strategies, given that the discussion began with prosperity gospel and Christian frameworks. Bowler answered from her own tradition, while keeping the distinction between joy and completion intact.

She teaches at a divinity school, among pastors, nonprofit workers, and “do-gooders,” and said she believes God gives joy as moments of temporary wholeness so people can live with uncertainty, unfinishedness, and what Karl Rahner called the “unfinished symphony” of their lives. The language is important: joy is not a permanent fixing of the ache. It is a momentary fullness that lets people live inside what remains unfinished.

Bowler contrasted that with pretending the world is already as one wishes it to be. Denial, in her account, does not create completeness. But there are moments that feel “existentially full and almost perfect,” moments that remind people of “the beginning” and of what things could be. For Bowler, those moments offer “an incredible glimpse into the divine mind.”

That answer also clarifies her relation to the Christian framework she earlier questioned. She did not abandon spiritual language for the ache; she rejected a version of that language that treats incompleteness as evidence of inadequate faith. The spiritual alternative she described is not miraculous completion “all the live long day,” but the gift of temporary wholeness in an unfinished life.

The final audience question moved from individual joy to national life. The questioner asked how a country can find joy amid mixed history, mixed feelings, and the approach of a national anniversary. Kate Bowler answered by treating joy as a diagnostic for public rhetoric and political life.

When she sees what she called “the pretty horrifying death-dealing culture-warring of our times,” Bowler said one question to ask is whether it is joyless. Does it create an “other” for whom we no longer hope for wholeness? As an immigrant, she said she was horrified by what she described as a lack of deep interdependence and common grounding. Joy, in her account, is “insanely connective.” What is soul-filling for one person should create a desire for outpouring toward all.

Laurie Santos extended her earlier critique of toxic positivity from the self to institutions and countries. Love of country, she suggested, does not require denial. It can mean naming what is bad, disappointing, or wrong rather than pretending it is fine. As with a person’s emotional life, honest naming may be part of the path toward joy rather than its opposite.

Bowler then brought the discussion back to hard work. She quoted Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission, as saying, “Joy is the oxygen of doing hard things.” Her interpretation was that difficult work for justice requires repeated reminders of the deep goodness of those one loves and serves, and of one’s own goodness when the pain of the world begins to leach into the self.

In public life, as in private life, Bowler treated joy not as cheerfulness, denial, or an anesthetic against grief, but as something connective and sustaining. It asks whether the goodness one feels can be widened rather than hoarded. It does not erase the unfinished symphony. It gives people breath enough to keep living and working inside it.