An ice cream cone covered in small, round sprinkles, brightly-colored hot air balloons floating through the air, a pristine blue swimming pool sparkling under the sunlight — if these images sparked a sense of delight in you, you’re not alone.
In this TED talk, Ingrid Fetell Lee, designer and author of Joyful: the Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness,describes her 10-year journey to understand how an intangible concept like joy could manifest in the tangible, physical world.
The short answer? Joy can be found in the simple things you’ve most likely written off as being too old for.
Here are four takeaways from her talk:
Joy is hard to explainEven scientists don’t always agree on what joy is, and often use the words joy, happiness, and positivity interchangeably.
“Broadly speaking, when psychologists use the word joy, what they mean is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion — one that makes us smile and laugh and feel like we want to jump up and down,” Lee explains.
Joy differs from happiness. Where happiness is a measure of how good we feel over time, joy is about…
