The Book of Joy summary

Think about your body. If it’s healthy, the chances of you getting sick during flu season are lower. However, if your health is poor, even the slightest exposure to such a virus can make you deathly ill. Immunity and resilience are crucial to your physical health, and the same principle can be applied to your mind.

If you’ve built up a certain level of mental immunity over the years, emotional disturbances may still cause pain – but you’ll be much better poised to recover. Conversely, if your mental state is weak, suffering can be drawn out for months or years.

In Western society, the pressures of modern life can foster unrealistic expectations and desires; everybody wants a bigger apartment and a better career, and it’s easy to believe that more is always better.

However, what matters more than these expectations themselves is what happens when you inevitably fail to meet all of them. The result is almost always fear, which soon transforms into anger.

From the moment you wake up to the time you get into bed at night, how many people do you think you interact with?

For most people, the number is shockingly low, which poses serious problems, since loneliness is tied to a variety of health issues. But don’t worry, loneliness can be avoided by being openhearted and trusting others.

Anyone who has ever had a near-death experience can tell you that coming close to the end makes you value life all the more.

Prevailing in the face of difficulty almost inevitably leads to greater joy. Just take South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994. People lined up for miles to vote, and South Africans felt a profound gratitude for their new freedom. By contrast, US voter turnout in the same year was below 40 percent. After all, most US citizens at the time hadn’t fought for their right to vote and thus couldn’t appreciate it in the same way.

By now, you know how to manage your mental sphere to shed fear and anger. Next, it’s time to look to the positive side and learn how to cultivate happiness. To do so, there’s nothing more helpful than the eight pillars of joy. Let’s take a look at these in turn.

The first of the pillars is perspective. After all, if you can observe circumstances through a wider lens, you’ll soon realize that any given moment won’t last forever, which will sharpen your focus on the present and bring joy and hope into your life.

Most people know that nothing alleviates a stressful situation better than a good joke, and it should thus come as no surprise that humor is the third of the pillars of joy.

Following the Rwandan genocide, Desmond Tutu was invited to speak to the Hutus and Tutsis, the two warring ethnic groups in the conflict. The situation was tense, but Tutu rose to the challenge of speaking to such sensitive subject matter by using humor as a tool.

Are you thankful for your warm bed and the clean water that comes out of your tap? Well, if you live in the West, you probably never think about either of these luxuries; they’re expected and are usually taken for granted.

However, for many people around the world, no such simple amenities exist. In the end, we could all stand to be more grateful for what we have, which is why gratitude constitutes an essential pillar of joy.

Do you get a special kind of satisfaction from giving gifts to other people? Many people do, and it’s only natural. After all, offering someone a present that they truly appreciate produces a little buzz – an intense feeling of happiness.

That’s why the seventh pillar of joy is compassionate concern. Evolutionary biologists have even said that compassion is a core aspect of human self-interest. They cite a concept known as reciprocal altruism, a feeling of joy experienced when helping others. This concept is apparent in children as young as six months.