A Journey to Genuine Joy: Finding Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness

Two guys’ transformative journey and holistic approach to human life and happiness

Visual by Cyril & Ty

Joy. The feeling that there is beauty in living. Warm, timeless, absolute, undeniable. Filling us up, body and mind.

What we’re talking about here is the unadulterated rush of life that flows through us, elevates us, and makes us feel like anything is possible.

Something other than the fleeting pleasure of eating junk food, only to feel sick or terrible about ourselves when we’re done. Something other than getting hammered out of our minds, only to feel completely out-of-it the next day. Something other than making money at someone else’s expense, only to lose ourselves a bit more every day.

The joy we’re talking about is completely devoid of any bitterness or regret; it is pure, untainted genuine joy.

We feel it when interacting with children, or when laughing with friends; after creating something beautiful, accomplishing something dear to us, or even working out; we feel it when helping someone else, or when unexpectedly and spontaneously exchanging smiles with a stranger.

Whether you call it joy, or pleasure, or fun, the defining part of it is that, instead of a bitter aftertaste, it leaves a trail of gentle satisfaction, a deep undeniable feeling of meaning and worth. It may vary in intensity or duration, but down the line, it just lets us feel good.

It’s the joy we’ve been looking to experience, understand, cultivate, and share. The one that’s taken us on a transformative journey of purpose, meaning, and happiness.

A PURPOSE: Looking for More

THE START OF SOMETHING NEW: Acknowledging Genuine Joy

A few years back, for us, two brothers in their early and late twenties, born and raised in a middle-class family in western society, genuine joy was a feeling that we — just like many others — had mostly experienced as children, free from concern and bursting with faith in living.

A feeling which seemed to become rarer and more evanescent, as we were growing, and progressively experiencing more of life.

Why was that? Why would living continuously lose in taste and worth as that feeling of wonderful now only appeared ever so locally, and almost always with a bitter aftertaste?

And creeping up was the dark sensation that the best was either long gone, cloaked in fantasy or shelved as empty promises, while the worst was yet to come, and the memory of the very feeling of original, carefree joy progressively disappeared.

How could we be yearning on so many levels for something seemingly out of our grasp as adults, after initially experiencing it as children?

We looked at the parts of our adult existences that would still bear traces of it, ephemeral as they may be: spending time with children, losing ourselves in passionate creation, bursting with carefree laughter, dancing to our favorite songs, or sharing intimacy with someone.

Beyond these fragmentary experiences, we just did not feel fulfilled, and certainly not joyful. A lot of what we felt about our lifestyles, our bodies, the thoughts in our minds, and the visions of our futures, was tainted by a good deal of pain and fear, and we didn’t see a clear way out.

How then could we have got so disconnected from that nothing-else-matters joy? From basking in it most of our time as children, to feeling it progressively leave our grasp as teenagers, and finally end up thinking of it as a bitter delusion with adult minds: what had gotten in the way?

GAINING HINDSIGHT: Culture isn’t Truth

Growing up had happened, it seemed. Well, not just growing up… Growing up the way we had, learning what we had learned. Absorbing specific content: food, thoughts, constraints, habits, goals… all part of the culture we were born into.

A cultural content which we mostly didn’t get to choose as children or teenagers, but which shaped so much of the adults we had become while going against the original joy we remembered, and the life we were yearning for.

From the inside, it’s easy to forget that any culture is but a sum of individual behaviors and perspectives; everything that’s ever been said, every book that’s been written, every rule or law that’s ever been proclaimed is simply the reflection of someone’s beliefs at some point in space and time.

Not to get mired in agnosticism, but the fact that different existing cultures can have different approaches — beliefs and behaviors — to the same issues, topics or fields, tends to go against the possibility for any single culture to equate absolute truth.

Whether it be about science, religion, or hearsay, it pretty much boils down to content being expressed by some people, and subsequently accepted by some people. This does not make such content untrue, in and of itself, but that doesn’t intrinsically make it true either.

Starting to consider the culture we had been born into as simply one way to look at things and not almighty truth was the first step towards breaking free from the mental shackles we had subsequently grown into.

And so, after experiencing existence as the culture we knew had taught us, in the form of specific beliefs and behaviors, we decided it was time for us to try something else.

CHOOSING OUR PURPOSE: We want Joy

What we had been lacking for so long was a purpose. A sense of direction, a point of reference, something to hold on to and a way to identify the good from the bad, the happy from the sad, the beautiful from the ugly and, ultimately, what we wanted from the rest.

With a purpose, meaning and discerning arise, while growth and worth are redefined. The subsequent focus can allow us to concentrate on what matters, leaving out all the noise, therefore expediting execution and results.

And that’s when we decided that, instead of settling for only experiencing it every once in a while, waiting for it to happen miraculously, we would make genuine joy our purpose. Choosing to work to experience it as much as we could, in most everything we did.

We knew joy was something we could experience, since we had before and would still occasionally, which meant we did have the physical and mental capacity for it. And we knew that this feeling was the only one we were after.

We also knew some things were out of our control; that, with the right mindset, we could learn to accept. But when it came to what we did have control over, from that point on we were determined not to relinquish a drop of it anymore, and instead direct all we had and were towards our chosen purpose of genuine joy.

And so, questions remained that we wanted answers to:

• Why do we feel so much fear?
• How can we make sense of our emotions?
• How can we get rid of pain?
• Why do we love certain things, and hate other things?
• How can we experience joy as much and as often as possible?

And that’s when cool stuff started to happen.

A VISION: Believing in Life and Joy

After making the grand — yes, some would say naive — decision to pursue the purpose of joy in our lives, the first thing we had to do was trying to figure out what joy exactly was, how it worked, what led to it and how we could experience as much of it as often as possible.

OWNING IT: Our Joy or Someone Else’s Truth?

We started half-blindly pursuing new ways to do what we were used to doing then, one interaction at a time: eating, exercising, working… Like stumbling in the dark, from one alleged panacea to another, torn between clickbait studies, internet gurus, credential-wielding authors, and peer advice with claims to the absolute.

Basically listening to people insisting on their holding the truth, though many of them did not seem to actually walk their talk or even enjoy the results they were advertising, just as these same results kept eluding us as well.

Still, we were trying to make sense of it all by bringing any and all of the odd-shaped pieces of lifestyle improvement we could find together, in an attempted picture of holistic joyful living.

But, unlike those we were trying to draw inspiration from, we were not after being right.

We were simply after something that would work for us, and fully resonate with our subjective personal experiences and the one thing that we believe we could aspire to access without restraint in this life: how we truly feel.

After all, outside of what triggers it, what we feel is real. Whatever we feel, whether justified or not, we do feel.

And if we were honest with ourselves, most of what we found out there didn’t give us the deep satisfaction we were after; many improvements in some ways, but still not enough.

Although trying new things and getting out of our comfort zones was a good first step towards bettering our lives, it did seem that blindly following someone who claimed to wield the truth was not the answer we were looking for, not when deep inside we were still not fully satisfied. It just felt more like another form of cultural delusion.

There was still a part of ourselves that we could claim, to assume full responsibility for our experiences. That was the difference between hiding behind someone else’s truth and pretending it worked for us, and trusting our views and the subjective experiences of how we truly felt, just enough to realize that we might well be in the best position to know what was good for us.

And so, after first embracing our chosen purpose, we resolved to embrace the legitimacy and reality of our subjectivity, to find our own ways to genuine joy.

WHAT IF? Finding a Meaning for Joy

For us, there had to be more than randomness connecting all the things which could bring genuine joy into our lives. A reason for it that meant joy did not just hit people out of nowhere and with no particular meaning.

While we enjoyed reading works of philosophy, such as Stoicism, Taoism, existentialism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, among others, none of it gave us quite what we were looking for. Whether feeling a bit impractical, or being more about ataraxy — the absence of pain — than genuine satisfaction, or not quite holistic enough for us.

Until we finally came across a book called La Puissance de la Joie by French philosopher and author Frédéric Lenoir.

After some time spent following our subjectivity and experimenting, we had established quite a collection of happy behaviors and habits for ourselves, but we lacked a way to take it to the next level, and make sense of all these as a whole.

Surely after he had himself been inspired by many others and their works, Frédéric Lenoir presented something in his book which we had long been looking for: a meaning for joy.

And so, Frédéric Lenoir offered that:

“ We feel joy when we experience something that makes us grow, that increases our vitality.”
(Lenoir, F. La Puissance de la Joie, translated from the original French by Cyril & Ty)

Once more, we looked at the different faces of joy. Laughing our hearts out with friends. Driving on a sunny day singing our favorite song at the top of our lungs. Spotting the face of a loved one in an airport terminal. Basking in the warm sun with a gentle breeze. A stranger saying thank you, or doing a selfless act of kindness.

For us, these were indeed all behaviors through which we could feel that we grew and fostered the life in us.

Inspired by Frédéric Lenoir’s approach and fuelled by our personal observations, we opened up to the idea that, beyond the sheer spirituality of it, the meaning for our ability to feel joy we were looking for could well be a biological one, coded in our very selves.

That much like hunger, breathing, or immunity, joy could be a purposeful biological mechanism. Specifically, one that was meant to steer us in a certain direction, that of what elevated us as humans.

This could mean that we had this incredibly sophisticated compass inside of us, pointing us in the direction of human life growing.

And, if we bothered to listen closely, this compass could show us the way and help us navigate the seas of existence.

For us, this meant that we, as living beings, were free to use our bodies and our minds as tools to empower and fulfill our innate desire for joy.

This also meant that joy could ultimately be seen as how life itself was meant to feel to us. That we would be feeling joy, a DNA-coded feedback, as we were getting closer to the life we as humans were designed to experience, to indicate that we were on the right track.

Our choosing joy as a purpose, combined with the notion of joy indicating what life feels like, led us to this surprisingly simple discovery: for us, the purpose and meaning of life could be life itself. Aiding life, spreading life, creating, and fulfilling life. And for us humans, that would mean thriving as a person, helping others, procreating, sharing, and so on. The more life you’d spread for you and others, the more joy you’d get.

So there it was: in joy we could see our genetic interpretation of human life. The way our beings could tell us that we were doing what we were meant to be doing as humans aspiring to live and be happy, imbued with autotelic life.

From this premise, a new meaningful way of living could emerge: a new vision, a new lifestyle, and new rewards.

THE WORKINGS OF JOY: A Holistic Approach with Human Entropy

After updating our views of the world with a unifying meaning for joy, we wanted to find a way to unify joyful and life-promoting behaviors in terms of function as well.

A way to account for all joyful occurrences as we experienced them with our minds, bodies, and relationships: from feeling energetic, to having happy thoughts; from good digestion to mental clarity; from finding inspiration to helping others, etc.

That’s how we came up with the idea of Human Entropy.

We’ve called it so in reference to the physical quantity named entropy, used as part of the study of thermodynamics. A simple way we would describe entropy is as pertaining to energy and matter exchanges leading to the creation of new configurations of things.

And so, the way we see it, everything works according to the principle of entropy:

The universe itself is made of objects, and all the interactions and exchanges in between them, constantly leading to new arrangements of matter and energy in space.

Some more complex objects, like living things, can be seen as systems exchanging with their environments: things go in, a conversion of sorts occurs inside, and other things come out as a result. They are what we’ve come to call entropic converters.

The best example is that of an engine. By putting fuel in, the engine can run and convert the fuel to movement, while releasing exhaust.

And, the way we see it, we human beings work as entropic converters, or engines, both with our bodies and our minds. For example: we eat, digestion happens in our bodies, we then end up with energy to move around, and we poop. We hear someone talk, our minds process it, and we can answer back.

This “in > conversion > out” concept is pretty much the basic pattern for every behavior you can ever come up with.

Very fancy, but what’s all this got to do with joy though? Well, we believe that how we feel acts as the feedback for the conversions of substance — energy, matter, thoughts, or whatever it may be — happening within us, and which purpose is to spread human life.

And when that conversion performs as it is intended to, we spontaneously feel joy.

This concept of inner conversion applies to both our bodies and our minds, in the form of, respectively, our metabolisms and our mental processes, such as reasoning and memory.

And, just like an engine, this overall human conversion comes with a few built-in requirements. For life-promoting things to come out, and for joy to be felt, certain things need to be put in and let out:

• for our bodies to work properly, we need to put the right sort of air and food in them and exhale as well as evacuate and move in ways that respect their biomechanics;
• if we want a mind that produces great things, we want to feed it inspiring content and let it create and express itself without being hindered by doubt or limiting beliefs.

After all, so much of what we experience with our bodies and minds happens autonomously, without us having to think about it: digestion, healing, memory, our very heartbeats, the love we have for others, the triggering of joy…

So when we stray from the innate requirements of our bodies and minds, we experience friction or damage, and some amount of pain, as the opposite of joy, because our beings don’t have the capacity to deal with whatever we’re putting them through in an optimal manner.

Coming back to our engine analogy: if we don’t put the right kind of fuel in, if we mix it with something that compromises its efficiency, if don’t put enough, or clog the exhaust, or hinder the movement output, or if we damage the structural integrity of the engine, then things won’t go smoothly and the whole thing is compromised.

And so, we do not control the immutable DNA-coded workings and requirements of our inner conversion process any more than we control gravity or the flow of time.

In the end, this analogy of human beings working as converters allows us to make sense of the causality of what do and what we get:

• it brings the two aspects of what we put in and what we let out together;
• around a central inner conversion influenced by both these aspects;
• and which comes with innate requirements and includes many autonomous processes.

This means that our deliberate behaviors, when it comes to what we put in and let out of our minds and bodies, directly influence the conversion happening within us and its feedback, in the form of how we feel.

And so, based on this idea of osmosis between what we deliberately let in and out of our bodies and minds, and the largely autonomous conversions happening within them, for us, an effective human entropy simply flows and feels like joy.

Beyond the application of human entropy to the workings of our individual bodies and minds, we can also use it to approach our relationships and connections to one another: since, as humans, we all share theses same innate workings and requirements, then, beyond feeling how our own conversion is performing, we’re also sensitive to that of others, through empathy and compassion.

When we witness someone else’s pain, we feel some of that pain, and we want to help, which means, help the conversion within them. When a loved one like a child or a friend manifests joy, which means they experience a joyful conversion, we are happy for them, and share in that joy too, experiencing our own joyful conversion.

This means that we’re also all connected in a network of collective human entropy, like engines with the potential to generate movement in the same direction. And so we’ve precisely come to think of life itself as movement imbued with innate direction.

Down the line, the overall idea of a conversion process occurring within each of us pertains to what we see as the inescapable reality at the core of the experience we call existence: our human nature.

And if we don’t play by the rules, there are some things that we just can’t get away with joyfully, or as joyfully as could be.

Still, beyond the innate and immutable requirements of this inner conversion, we do have a fair amount of control over many of our behaviors, which in turn influence this conversion, and the autonomous processes happening within us, including the triggering of joy.

And so, with the logic of human entropy in mind, we kept working on making more and more adjustments to the ways we were living our lives. Because, believe it or not, it did seem that we had not been raised for joy.

A LIFESTYLE: The Power of Joy

We used to feel like what we wanted, along with the very tools to access it, was all out there, hidden or just beyond our reach. At the same time, we felt some sort of dormant potential within us.

We then embraced the perspective that access to joy was coded within our very selves, and that, if we cared enough to listen, our minds and bodies were amazing tools to unlock it, through interactions and human entropy.

This holistic approach brought together the concepts of joy, our surrounding circumstances, and our inner human potential, in an osmotic way, around the idea of an innate and largely autonomous conversion within us, with a purpose of life and feedback in the form of joy.

OUR HUMAN POTENTIAL: Tools to Navigate Existence

Unfortunately, it seemed that, to a wide extent, the culture we had been exposed to had us going about our interactions with little to no consideration not just for our feelings, but also for our bodies and minds, as if completely transparent, irrelevant or with infinite plasticity.

Yet, we see our bodies and minds as the necessary DNA-coded components through which we experience existence, and which therefore have specific workings and requirements we can’t ignore and hope to get away with joyfully.

So, with the overall principle of human entropy in mind, and from the premise that joy was the feedback for life, we tried to take a look at the way we do and think about things.

• What makes our minds and bodies tick?
• What are we drawn to, and what do we tend to stay away from?

Well, as we talked about earlier, we are attracted to joy, which, from the perspective that joy is our genetic interpretation of life, means we are attracted to life.

So we find things that we perceive to have powerful life forces beautiful and desirable, and it makes us happy to interact with them. And we feel that attraction in our bodies and minds, in the form of desire, as they allow us to interact with our environment.

Conversely, we feel repulsion for things we perceive to be morbid, in the form of fear, and pain when experiencing destructive behaviors.

For us, it’s as simple as that; everything else is noise and pollutes this basic equation of life.

This can explain why some things can be widely considered beautiful: human or animal babies, fit bodies, fertile landscapes, flowers, sunrises… They represent life potentials and evocations of joyful possibilities which we are undeniably drawn to.

Likewise, some things spontaneously tend to feel undesirable and unattractive: barren wastelands, sickness, dirty cityscapes, and things related or leading to death.

And so, for us, it is our innate desire for joy and life, or as we’ve come to call it, love, and our DNA-coded fear of pain and death, both expressed through our bodies and minds, which lead to every single one of our actions, whether we realize it or not.

From this binary pattern stems the unlimited variety of human interactions.

From the tiniest most local interactions — how we use our bodies, our minds, what we feed them, how we move, breathe, eat, think… — to the greatest endeavors: how we can lead full lives and share them with others.

FROM POTENTIAL TO POWER: Empowered by our Minds, Bodies, and Relationships

Indeed, on our journeys to genuine joy, we discovered that, far from being obstacles or limitations, our bodies and minds were the tools to unlock our power of joy, provided we went along with them, by experimenting and acknowledging how we felt.

Most notably, we found our beings’ capacity for adaptation to be tremendously empowering.

Indeed, when trying a new behavior, we can often notice significant results anywhere from instantly to only 24 to 72 hours, and choose if we want to keep it up or drop it:

• Our bodies, through processes such as homeostasis and overcompensation, can adjust in terms of composition, energy output, and waste management. This means, for instance, that our body fat and muscle mass are directly affected by our diet and physical exercise regimens, and that noticeable results happen within only 2 to 3 days.
• As for our minds, well, through sensory processing, reasoning, and memory, we can learn, as we retain information and behavioral schemas. This means, for instance, that we can notice durable and systematic changes in our own behaviors, in 24 hours or less.

And so, we’ve come to call this overall ability of our beings to constantly try to adapt and optimize themselves according to how we use them our beings’ autonomous adaptation.

This means that, within us, is a capacity for life and joy such that, within a day or two of trying something new, our bodies and minds let us experience new results in tangible and noticeable ways, empowering us to choose if we want to keep it up or drop it, based on how we feel.

So, including some of the points we discussed earlier, the logic of human entropy, combined with experimentation and observation, has led us to acknowledge several complementary and osmotic aspects of existence, as we experience it:

• our innate immutable inner workings and requirements, the very fact we have bodies, minds, and feelings, or require breathing, sleep, etc.
• the autonomous processes happening within us, such as digestion, the triggering of feelings and joy, etc.
• our beings’ capacity for autonomous adaptation, through our body composition, mind content, etc.
• our capacity for deliberate behaviors, as we choose what we eat, how we move, what we learn, how we express ourselves, etc.
• our similarities and connections to one another, in a network of collective human entropy.

For us, all of these aspects are part of our inescapable human nature, and acknowledging them has been instrumental in experiencing it more happily and joyfully.

And so, our new approaches to purpose, meaning, and our workings as human beings have progressively lead us to some significant shifts in how we could use and experience our own beings, as well as others:

• We started to use our minds as tools for a life-and-joy-empowering representation of things: a mental representation we could adjust in real time, according to what we experienced and wanted, helping us move forward joyfully in our subjectivity, rather than looking to be right or refusing to adapt.
• We came to see our bodies as necessary but also life-and-joy empowering interfaces with the world: by fully acknowledging and taking care of them through our daily lives — through how we ate, moved, breathed, slept, relaxed, etc.— and remaining in touch with how we felt in them, our bodies could adapt in empowering ways and help us thrive.
• Finally, we resolved to treat our relationships as mutual opportunities to share life and joy: outside of a priori beliefs and prejudice, by voicing our subjective experience, inviting others to do the same, and listening to them, we could try to find common accesses to satisfaction, in place of power struggles or misplaced egos.

These were all changes that were ours to try, explore, and enjoy.

CLOSING THE LOOP: Connecting Happiness and the Power of Joy

The state of readiness in which we actively pursue and make use of this power of joy, fuelled by the memory of past joy, and animated by the faith and excitement in joy to come, as we explore the possibilities that living holds for us, is precisely what we’ve come to call happiness.

From this perspective, happiness can be seen as being in love with life.

Just as we take care of someone we love, accept them for who they are, feel joy when interacting with them, and maybe inspire them and help them grow with the love we show them, so can we take care of life, in us and around us, find it in ourselves to accept certain things, and experience joy when interacting with it, helping it grow and making it better, for ourselves and others.

In the end, for us, the power of joy helps bring everything together, from purpose to meaning, human entropy, and happiness, through 3 complementary and osmotic dimensions:

• the power that joy has on us, through desire, love and how attracted we are to it;
• the power we have to access to joy, by happily pursuing and experiencing life-promoting behaviors and occurrences, compatible with our human nature;
• the power we have with joy, to positively affect our minds, bodies, relationships, and surroundings, and make the most of our human potential.

And so, from a state of happiness, we actively explore possibilities to access joy, and the joy we experience in turn helps fuel our happiness. Both can therefore work together in an osmosis of life-promoting satisfaction: what we call the power of joy.

Thank you for reading. We hope you found value in what we shared about our personal journeys and approaches.

As individuals, we all have different circumstances, so whatever we share, we share only for inspiration: nothing peremptory, judgmental, moralizing, or alienating in our intentions.

As it is, we look at individual existence as an ongoing experience, the continuous sum of opportunities to play a role in the cosmic phenomenon of human life, for whatever time we have, and with whatever tools we gain access too.

It is our experience that embracing our human potential through playful experimentation, rather than being limited by a priori constraints and beliefs, defines what many call happiness, and that in fulfilling it daily, with our bodies, minds, and relationships, we get to find purpose, meaning, and life-affirming genuine joy.

About Us

We’re two brothers who’ve made feeling genuinely good a priority in our lives. We only share personal experience, of things we’ve done, and things we still do, in open, transparent, and practical ways, as we believe others can enjoy them too, and that, when looking for more, there’s value in trying! You’re welcome to leave a comment, check out our outlets by visiting us at cyrilandty.com, pop us an email, and connect with us on Twitter.

References

Lenoir, F. (2015). La Puissance de la Joie. Paris: Fayard