Not everyone has joie de vivre; not everyone feels joy at being alive. It's an uncomfortable truth, which is why few people say it out loud. But you only have to look around carefully, and not just at social media where we all seem to live normal lives, to realize that many people are simply surviving... they are not living, they are not present in the “river of existence.”
The joy of living is a stroke of luck, a privilege, a lottery win, a blessing, a gift of life, but it is not guaranteed.
It does not come with birth or with having health, money, love, family, a partner, children, or success, because there are people who have everything and yet live with an existential void because they have no joy in living, no joy in being alive, and others who are poor and have nothing laugh with true inner joy and are happy to be alive... life has no fixed formula.
I can write about this topic because I have felt the “joy of living”... During my childhood and adolescence, I was very self-conscious and lived very unhappily. I couldn't feel any inner joy for anything, but I admired it in those I saw who were joyful.
The lack of inner joy has no clear cause and is not always clinical depression or obvious trauma; sometimes it is something more subtle... A feeling of indifference towards what gives others joy, a slight feeling of permanent boredom, an accumulation of small disappointments, a routine that sickens the soul, a temperament that does not vibrate with the enthusiasm that others manage to feel and express... and that makes them 100% ordinary humans who live without enthusiasm compared to the lucky few who are happy because life smiles on them because they feel the joy of living.
The social pressure to fit in with the ideal, “you have to be positive”... to always find the beautiful side of everything, is enormous, but what if you can't? What if I haven't been able to for years? The mandate to be well is sometimes more suffocating than the discomfort of existential emptiness itself...
Joy cannot be forced, but it can be sought... with sincerity, integrity, and self-respect, with the help of a psychologist and alternative personal development therapies, you can seek the joy of living, and it works because I have experienced it. Sometimes it is enough to stop paying attention to it for something to begin to blossom within you.
If joy does not come with colorful fireworks, then let it come like a gentle breeze... Like a morning without anxiety, with a coffee drunk in peace... Like a mischievous conversation... Like a day without past or future, only present... That is also living.
And maybe one day, without reason, that feeling will appear, as it did to me. I was 30 years old, and that day was the first time I didn't wake up with a slight feeling of anxiety that disappeared as soon as I washed my face. That day I woke up feeling light, and suddenly a ray of sunlight came in, creating a golden atmosphere in the bedroom, and suddenly I was overcome with an inner feeling of total joy and wonder. I felt that it was a blessing to be alive, and I was enveloped by a feeling of gratitude and well-being that melted my heart...
That's more or less how I felt the joy of living that accompanied me for many years until I lost the love of my life... Today I live in peace, with a sorrow that has become distant with the passing of time.