Just say ‘no’, and learn to love missing out if you want to stop feeling stressed and overwhelmed
- In a world where joy is at a premium, it’s time to stop searching for the best way to get it and declutter your life – suiting yourself is the way to happiness
- Don’t be afraid to be selfish and please yourself, not others, for a change
What brings you joy? It is a question that is hard to avoid these days, as joy seems to be the new buzzword.
It is on the cover of two new books, The Joy of No: #Jono by Debbie Chapman, published at the end of last year, and The Joy of Missing Out, by the philosopher and psychologist Svend Brinkmann, published this month. It is also on Netflix, in the show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, in which the decluttering guru and author tells us to discard any possessions that do not “spark joy”.
But joy is not the only idea linking these three approaches: Chapman, Brinkmann and Kondo all tap into the same zeitgeisty wish to clean up our cluttered lives. For Kondo, it is about household clutter; for Chapman and Brinkmann, it is life clutter.
As Brinkmann writes in The Joy of Missing Out – his reversal of the Twitter phenomenon #Fomo, the fear of missing out – there is growing pressure to go out more, acquire more and just be more. This pressure comes from without and from within, from advertising and social media as well as from our own minds.
“We are constantly invited to do something, think something, experience something, buy something […] when inundated by overwhelming amounts of information, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish what is important from what is not,” Brinkmann writes.