💀 Dying Every Day
Dying Every Day is a podcast by the Perennial Leader Project. Each episode turns a selected passage from Stoic philosophy into a guided meditation designed to help you (and me) learn how to live.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
There Are Two Kinds of Joy—Most People Are Chasing the Wrong One
Welcome to Dying Every Day. This is Day 146.
“What is human life’s chief concern? One of the answers we should receive would be: ‘It is happiness.’ How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact, for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do and of all they are willing to endure.”
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
James is not answering it yet. He is naming it—honestly, without embarrassment—as the question most of us are actually living, beneath whatever other questions we think we are asking.
The secret motive.
The “thing” behind the thing.
This series has spent several episodes in difficult territory. Courage, death, control, desire, anger, and assent. The philosophical work of looking clearly at hard things. And today we turn—deliberately—toward something the series has circled without landing on. Joy.
Not as a retreat from difficulty. Not as a reward for those who have done the harder work. But as something Seneca argued was the hardest work of all.
Something that had to be learned, cultivated, and practiced. Something, he insisted, that most people who think they have it do not actually have at all.
William James, a nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, spent years studying the full range of human experience—religious crisis, mystical encounter, and the ordinary texture of daily life. What he found, again and again, was that the pursuit of happiness was not a shallow concern but the deepest one, the one that motivated everything else.
But happiness, James observed, comes in two very different forms.
There is the happiness that depends on circumstances—on getting what you want, on the day cooperating, on fortune being kind. It is real, while it lasts. And it does not last.
And then there is something else. Something that does not rise and fall with the weather of events. Something James could describe but struggled to name—until he reached for a phrase that stopped him in his tracks. More on that in a few moments.
Here’s how Seneca put it:
“Above all, my dear Lucilius, make this your business: learn how to feel joy.”
Learn how to feel joy. Not find joy. Not pursue joy. Not wait for joy to arrive when circumstances improve or when the hard work is done. Learn how to feel it—as a skill, as a practice, and as something that requires instruction, effort, and time.
Seneca is writing this letter from retirement, near the end of his life. He has governed, advised an emperor, survived exile, and watched friends die. He is not writing from a position of comfortable ease. He is writing from within a life that has asked a great deal of him—and he is telling Lucilius (and us, I might add), with an urgency that crosses two thousand years, make this your business.
He continues:
“Do you think that I am now robbing you of many pleasures when I try to do away with the gifts of chance? Quite the contrary—I do not wish you ever to be deprived of gladness. I would have it born in your house; and it is born there, if only it be inside of you.”
Born in your house. Inside of you.
Stay with that image for a moment. Not imported from somewhere else. Not contingent on what the morning delivers or what fortune decides to give or withhold. Born in the house—already there, already available, needing only to be found and cultivated and tended.
This is the distinction Seneca presses. There is the joy that comes from outside: from pleasure, from success, from circumstances arranging themselves favorably. He does not dismiss it—he knows it is real, he knows it feels like joy, he knows why people spend their lives chasing it. But he calls it a coating. A thin pleasure laid over the surface of things, plated rather than solid. And plating wears off.
What he is after—what he wants for Lucilius—is something underneath. Something that discloses itself more fully the deeper you penetrate into it. Something that does not depend on fortune because it does not come from fortune.
Now back to James. And what he offers next is one of the most precise descriptions of this interior condition in modern philosophy:
“A solemn state of mind is never crude or simple—it seems to contain a certain measure of its own opposite in solution. A solemn joy preserves a sort of bitterness in its sweetness; a solemn sorrow is one to which we intimately consent.”
— William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Solemn joy, mixed with a touch of bitterness in its sweetness.
This is not the joy of a good day. This is not the happiness of getting what you wanted or the relief of things going well. This is something older and stranger—a joy that has not turned away from difficulty but has passed through it and arrived somewhere that difficulty can no longer destabilize.
A joy that contains its own opposite in solution. That knows what sorrow is, has consented to it, and remains.
Seneca said something almost identical in language that might surprise us coming from a Stoic philosopher: real joy, believe me, is a stern matter. Not cheerful, not light, not the blithe expression of a man whose life has been easy. Stern. Solid. Revealing itself more fully, the deeper you go.
Both men describe the same interior condition. Not a feeling that comes and goes, but a quality of the soul that persists beneath the feelings. Not happiness as we usually mean it—dependent, fragile, and contingent on the world’s cooperation.
This notion is what the last few episodes have been leading up to, and what must be stated clearly before we proceed.
This kind of joy is not easier than grief, anger, or loss. It is harder. The plated pleasure is simpler—it requires nothing of you except that you keep fortune on your side, which is to say it requires something you cannot guarantee. But the deep vein Seneca points to requires everything the series has been practicing: the willingness to face death without flinching, to examine what you are attached to, to look at your anger and find the must beneath it, and to catch the impression before you assent to it automatically.
The person who wants the coating is choosing something that feels easier.
The person who goes for the deep vein is choosing something that will cost them. Something that James called solemn. Something that Seneca called stern. Something that contains its opposite in solution, because it has not been purchased by looking away.
The meditations that brought us here were not simply exercises in philosophical difficulty. They were preparation. Each one removed a piece of the furniture of false joy—the pleasures that depend on fortune, the happiness that rises and falls with the day—and in doing so, cleared ground for something else. Something born in the house rather than imported.
Something that discloses itself more fully as you penetrate deeper.
Seneca put it this way,
“The yield of poor mines is on the surface; those are really rich whose veins lurk deep, and they will make more bountiful returns to the one who delves unceasingly.”
Delves unceasingly. That is the word for it. Not arrived at once, not achieved in a single meditation, a good week, or a moment of clarity. Delved into. Returned to. Worked, the way a miner works a rich seam—with patience, persistence, and the knowledge that what is most valuable is not on the surface and never was.
James spent his life studying the moments when people encountered something real beneath the surface of ordinary experience. He found it in religious conversion, in crisis, in the instances when the usual defenses gave way and something underneath was briefly visible. He would have recognized Seneca’s mine. He would have nodded at the solemn joy of it—the bitter in the sweetness of a joy that has been worked for rather than received.
They arrived at this place by different routes. James, the pragmatist, asked what works, what produces genuine human flourishing across the full range of experience, including its darkest stretches. Seneca, the Stoic, asked what is true—what kind of joy rests on a foundation fortune cannot reach. Different questions. In the same vein.
Daily Practice
Today’s daily practice is different from the others in this series. It does not ask you to examine a difficulty, find a must, notice an impression, or practice restraint. It asks you to look for what Seneca calls the true good—and to sit with what you find.
At some point today, stop.
Identify one thing that comes from your own store—not from fortune, not from cooperating circumstances, not from what someone did or didn’t do. Something that is yours because of who you are becoming and how you have chosen to live. A quality of character you have practiced. A relationship you have tended honestly. A commitment you have kept when keeping it was hard.
Sit with it. Not with pride—with something quieter and more honest. The recognition that something real is there. Something the day’s events cannot give and cannot take.
James called it solemn joy. Seneca called it the true good. Both spent their lives pointing toward it—not because it was easy to find, but because nothing else, in the end, was worth looking for.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
—
Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well.
J.W.
P.S. Catch up on recent (and past) meditations in the archive!
Thank you for this profound teaching - one of the most meaningful I have encountered.
oh yes someone said the j word