On The Necessity of Joy
Mardi Gras, Gaza, Kim Kardashian, why your brain needs play like oxygen
Hello friends.
Do you feel ok about feeling happy?
We are at a peak moment of revelry in the many calendars of the earth. It’s 农历新年快乐 - Happy Year of the Dragon for billions of people. In the Catholic world, Mardi Gras/Carnival/Carnaval just passed. In Judaism, the month of Adar is doubled this year—known as '“pregnant Adar”—making a kind of leap year, leading up to our own drunken masquerade holiday of Purim.
I grew up in Louisiana, where we dance at funerals. I love a party, and costuming is part of my spiritual practice. If I’m not down here sometime in the season, I feel bereft. This might sound funny if what you know about Mardi Gras is girls showing their breasts on Bourbon Street. But take it from me, for natives, it’s a wildly creative, beautiful, communal ritual of celebration.
But. These days, so many people I speak with, and many posts on social media as well, carry the sentiment that it is not ok or not seemly or even not possible to enjoy yourself given everything that’s going on in the world. Climate change. Gaza. The election.
I know it. I feel it too. We’re heartsick, our attention divided. It’s not safe to glance at your phone at a party—one push notification can change the whole mood.
It can sometimes feel like the mature, serious, moral thing to do is to pass up the chance to celebrate. Or at least have the decency to feel guilty if you catch yourself having fun or maybe even wearing clothes, sleeping in a warm bed, having something to eat. It can feel callous and perverse to flaunt your happiness and good fortune in times like these.
I want to gently offer another way of looking at this. (Thanks to my sister for talking this over).
Love for the world in all its imperfection, abiding joy, play, silliness, the pursuit of pleasure—these are necessary for survival. They are not optional.
If you spend time around kids, you know this. I often think about a story I did for NPR in 2019 when president Trump was separating migrant families at the border. There were thousands of children in federal detention. The Department of Health and Human Services announced that they were out of money for anything that was not "directly necessary for the protection of life and safety.” Meaning, like, soccer balls and art supplies. So I called up child development specialists, who told me that opportunities for recreation do in fact, rise to the level of necessity. Play is needed for healthy physical, mental, emotional and social development. And, emerging research suggests that when people are under conditions of great stress, they need to play even more:
“A very simple thing that Dr. Pamela Cantor told me is that when your brain is being bombarded with stress hormones every day, you actually need to move your body even more than usual so you can get oxygen to your brain. And this oxygenation - it helps buffer, potentially, long-term damage.”
There you have it. Physical play is like oxygen to the brain.
Now, it’s not always possible to put on a happy face. We’ve all been in situations where we’re called upon to celebrate but circumstances conspired against it. Maybe it was New Year’s Eve but you were sick. Maybe it was the holidays and you’d just lost someone close to you. Maybe it was, I don’t know, your 40th birthday in 2020. (It me).
But the polycrisis, the mess we’re in, goes beyond immediate circumstances. It’s all-pervasive. And we aren’t just affected—we are implicated. So if you wait to have fun until things are going okay, I have news for you: everything is never going to be okay. The only time to have fun is now, while things are fucked up.
And this is a lesson I’ve also brought home from a lifetime of carnival. Mardi Gras doesn’t wait for you to get your life together. People who are grieving, afraid, lonely, poor, hungry, sick, and struggling—in other words, all of us at different times—are all invited to the party. It’s also a major sensory overwhelm and endurance test, so no matter how well your life is going, Mardi Gras will always mix in a little rawness and even sadness with the joy. And that’s how it should be.
This year, for example, many people out there used their costumes, their signs and even their parade throws to express their desire for climate justice and healing for Palestine.
Because joy is resistance. And resistance is joy.