I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about joy. And more specifically about how to feel more joy, and measure it. Measure joy?? That sounds like crazy talk but I’d like to think that if we can have benchmarks and goals around other aspects of our health, why can’t our emotional state be included in that. After all, mental health is just as important as physical health. AmIRight?! 

In a previous post, I mused about this for about a minute before I ran out of time and had to cut and run on that essay. I suppose this is my attempt to pick up where I left off. I’d mentioned something about measuring joy and how it might be akin to measuring pain the way they do in hospitals and doctors offices. 

The Universe knows I’ve seen my fair share of the insides of medical facilities lately. Each time I am, I see that little picture of a series of “happy” faces that range from easy-peasy and pleasant to indifferent to downright angry. Angry like that orange face emoji that looks like it might reach out from a text message and strangle someone. Using emojis is a great way to illustrate…. 

😊🙂😐😕🙁😣😡

The pain scale goes from 0 to 10. Zero being no pain at all and 10 being the worst pain you can imagine. Of course this is subjective based on each individual and their experiences, physical thresholds, and triggering situation. 

It’s similar to how one person might evaluate a piece of creative writing differently than another. There’s good writing and not good writing and sometimes an opinion lands more based on personal preferences and experience than a rubric of writing craft criteria. 

Applying that to a feeling or emotion, the outcome depends somewhat on the individual. There’s peace and not peace, joy and not joy, angry and not angry, etc, with a sliding scale for each. 

For joy, maybe no joy is 0 — just utter dispair — and 10 is total elation — a real skipping-in-the-streets-singing-in-the-rain feeling. Or maybe a rainbow-bubbles-blowing-out-your-ass kind of happiness. 

But let’s say you hate skipping and singing, cringe at the idea of getting caught out in the rain, and never fart in public. If these sound unappealing, then that’s not a good representation of a total 10. 

I’m zeroing in on it now…. The “how.” Because in order to minimize the subjectivity which changes perception from person to person, the numbers have to be accompanied by a definition that can be applied in a universal sense, in terms that are fairly common and understood by everyone. The abstract must be transformed into something concrete. Again, similar to writing in that you have to show an emotion with words that elicit a feeling, instead of just telling it… I digress. 

I might propose…

Zero = No joy. It’s the absolute opposite of 10, sadness and despair. So what’s that like? Feeling so low, lethargic, and unmotivated that you can’t get out of bed in the morning. Dread like you’d rather stab your own eyeballs than do whatever it is you’re facing. Can we all agree on that? Perhaps. 

Two = Very little joy. You can get out of bed but let out an audible groan when you think about doing that “task.” Fuck that, you say, not doing it. 

Four = Feeling ok about it, but just don’t wanna. You are up and tackling your to-do list but that “thing” keeps getting bumped down the list in favor of other more enticing tasks. You procrastinate it for days or even weeks. Mmmmmhmmm, months bitches.  Have you put something off for literal months? I have. That’s what 4 feels like. It’s so ugh. 

Six = some joy. Over the hump of indifference. You want to get it done. You can’t let it go and know the end justifies the means. When you think about how it will be when it’s done, you smile and perhaps all you need is a self-pep talk.  It’s gonna be great. You can do this. 

Eight = a rad amount of joy. You’re in the zone and feeling good about it. In that active moment, you’ve got adrenaline on your side and the heart is bumping in a noticeable way. Whatever it is, you want to enjoy it, want it to last. It’s tits out. 

The perfect Ten. Yes, 10 = Elation. You’d sacrifice sleep for this. You think about it when you’re not working on it. You’re giggling about it and you’re not even a giggler. You feel warm inside, and a tingling sensation ripples through you. Too much? Too far? No way man, this is the best! 

Yeah…. Maybe this is it. The way to measure joy, which becomes even more concrete when applied to specific examples. 

You know, I started this piece of writing on February 12th, and got about halfway through before I had to set it aside. At that time, writing and getting my cardio, the measure of joy would have been about a  seven. Yeah, good feels. The words were coming easy and I was in a flow that was satisfying. I knew where I wanted it to go and that was energizing. 

A day or two later I returned to it and reread what I wrote. I wanted to continue but had lost a little bit of motivation. I knew where I wanted to take it, but couldn’t start. I’d fallen to a five or six on it. I still wanted to, but opted to work on something else instead. 

After that I returned a few more times and realized I felt even less joy at the thought of finishing the writing. I’d dropped again, to a place of indifference. So meh. But if you read my last post you know I can’t leave a bunch of half-birthed babies in my Google drive. 

So here I am, 13 days later and finally getting down to business. I gotta say, once I figured out how to keep going with a fair amount of continuity, and got back in the zone, my desire to finish and satisfaction with the process went back up to about a seven. That’s telling. 

It illustrates my ideas around measuring joy but also exposes a flaw inherent in the application of said idea. And that is that there’s a difference between measuring joy of a particular task while actively engaged in that task and measuring joy about it while just thinking about it, as an item on a to-do list. 

Many of the examples in my proposed ”Joy Scale” were about the latter, the thinking and feeling while not doing. Maybe it’s something that can only be measured in the moment or once a task is done. 

Now that this post is almost done, the overall score would probably average out to a six. But no matter the score, like most of the musing I do about life in blog or Substack posts, the value comes mostly from me actively writing through something I’m thinking about to figure out how I really feel about it. In this case, I think it’s been pretty valuable. 

Good gravy, do I need a value scale? 🤔 Nope… not going there. 😂 Guess this is it, then. If you’re still in it to win it with me, thanks for reading. 

Peace and love, 

~Miss SugarCookie 

PS. It only took me another 7 days after I finished this to actually post it cuz life’s been crazy. Of course in my final review I found more flaws in the proposed measurement system. But I’ve already spent way too much time on this stupid post and not fixing it now. There would be a zero amount of joy in that. 😂

PPS. The featured image was taken on the sunset drive I went on last evening. Sunset drives bring me lots of joy, like an 8 amount of joy. 💗