This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris.

Hey, hey, how are we doing everybody? Words like delight and joy. Yeah, I'm one level.

They sound great, but on another level, especially when you're as persnickety about languages. I am.

These words can come off as tweet or saccharine or cliched to the point of meaninglessness.

My guest today, however, this guy casts these terms delight and joy in a whole new light.

He makes them concrete and attractive and actionable. He also makes them radical. He portrays

delight and joy as necessary for our very survival and also as acts of resistance.

Ross Gay is perhaps best known for having written a book called The Book of Delights,

in which he cataloged one item or experience every day that gave him delight.

Now he's back with a new book called The Book of More Delights.

So we're going to talk about both of those books in this interview as well as a book that came out

between those two books called Insighting Joy. It's a wide-ranging interview.

We talk about what got Ross interested in the subjects of delight and joy in the first place,

how noting delight can be a tool for counter-programming against our evolutionarily wired negativity bias,

why Ross argues that there's an ethical component to delight, the benefits of writing by hand,

how both using smartphones and rushing through your daily activities can be delight blockers,

the difference between delight and joy, what he means when he refers to the offences of joy,

and the connection between grief and joy. A little bit more about Ross before he gets started

here. He's also written four books of poetry. One of those books, The Catalog of Unabashed

Gratitude, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He's also a founding board member of the

Bloomington Community Orchard, a nonprofit free fruit for all food, justice and joy project,

and he teaches at Indiana University. Busy dude.

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