Is It Okay to Feel Joy Anymore?
A Gen X Mom Offers Loving Advice to Her Son's Perpetually Outraged Generation
Lately I’ve been watching my son try not to laugh.
Not in a cruel way. Not like I’m goading him or testing him. Just small things—when we’re driving and I crack a ridiculous mom joke. Something dumb. Something about a dog in sunglasses. Or a song lyric I misquote on purpose just to see if I can get a smirk. Sometimes it almost works. I see it. The corners of his mouth twitch. A light in his eye. But then—no. He swallows it. Pushes it down. Reinstates the mask of pious misery.
He's 24 now. For eight years, he’s been cultivating a kind of curated bitterness. It started in high school. Took root in college. And now it’s a kind of philosophy—absorbed through osmosis from his peers, from social media, from the most politically admired voices in his generation. The message is consistent, if not outright declared:
If you allow yourself a sincere joy, you’re complicit in Everything Wrong with Everything. If you enjoy anything in an earnest way, you're unserious. If you are able to sometimes still smile in the time of genocide, you're part of the problem.
He doesn’t even eat coffee-flavored ice cream with joy anymore. He doesn’t let himself relax when we watch a movie. And the jokes that once made him laugh until he wheezed now just elicit a polite, haunted nod. As if any spark of happiness might mark him for cancellation.
And here’s the thing: I get it. I do. The world is literally on fire. Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. Climate collapse. Economic ruin. The absolute farce of American democracy. This generation has grown up with live shooter drills and scrolling through horror, addicted to a nonstop parade of algorithmic outrage. If Gen X was raised on MTV and Cold War nihilism, Gen Z was raised on livestreamed executions, oil-spill memes, and billionaires playing Hunger Games in real time.
But what breaks my heart—breaks it—is watching the person I love most in all the world believe that in order to prove he cares, he must suffer visibly and constantly.
This isn’t new. Throughout history, there’s always been pressure to wear grief like a uniform. But for those of us who came of age in a world before the 24-hour doom-feed, it hits different. We had our trauma, sure. But we also had joy, and we didn't apologize for it. It fortified us for the next fight.
Howard Zinn once said, "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."
Zinn didn’t mean we should ignore the cruelty. He meant we should remember what fuels resistance in the first place. It's not just rage. It's love. It's joy. It’s wanting to see your friends dance again. Wanting to hear your child laugh without shame.
Joy is not complicity. Joy is evidence that we still have something left worth saving.
In Buddhism, there’s a parable known as the Second Arrow. A man is shot while walking in the forest—a painful injury, no doubt. But then, the man begins to berate himself: Why did I come this way? Why wasn’t I more careful? Why didn’t I wear something brighter? In doing so, he adds a second wound—self-inflicted. The first arrow is the pain; the second is the suffering we create by judging that pain, by turning discomfort into shame. I can’t help but wonder if my son’s generation has been trained to shoot that second arrow at themselves every time they feel a flicker of happiness.
I grew up in New Mexico, where I knew of the Penitentes—Catholic laymen in remote mountain villages who believed pain could bring them closer to God. Every Holy Week, they’d flog themselves with whips, crawl on their knees through the dirt to sacred sites at Chimayo and Tome Hill, even stage crucifixion with themselves on the crosses. Their pain was sacred. But here’s the thing: they only did it once a year. Their suffering had ritual, purpose, rhythm. Today’s young people? They’re spiritually self-flagellating daily, with no release, no resurrection, and no community to hold the grief. It’s Penitente energy without the liturgy—just endless exposure, endless guilt, endless pressure to prove your moral seriousness by never feeling good again.
And the algorithms love it. Social media rewards visible distress. The more fragile you appear, the more virtuous you seem. Sociologist Jean Twenge has written about how Gen Z is the most anxious and depressed generation on record—not because they are inherently weaker, but because their brains have been marinating in crisis since puberty. They live double lives: one online, carefully curated for political purity and joy is taboo, and one offline, where they lock themselves in the bathroom and run the shower just so no one hears them crack a smile.
The people who have lived through the worst—enslavement, colonization, displacement, genocide—did not survive by denying joy. They survived by creating it. In music. In food. In art. In protest. In defiant assertion of their full and glorious humanity.
Audre Lorde knew this. She said, "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."
Thích Nhất Hạnh taught that joy and sorrow are not opposites, but companions. You don’t have to choose between them. You can grieve the world and still delight in a plum. You can fight for justice and still dance in the kitchen.
The work of Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach reminds us again and again that the key to peace is learning to hold two seemingly opposite truths at the same time, without resorting to black-and-white thinking and “bad othering.”
I want to tell my son: You don’t have to perform your pain to prove your morality. You’re allowed to be fully human. You’re allowed to feel joy, even if the world sucks. You must.
Because if we lose our joy, the bastards have already won.
We don’t get extra points for being miserable. We just turn pain into suffering. And a world in pain doesn’t needs suffering. It needs love.
So this is a love letter to all the serious young people out there—and to the weary elders watching them. I’m mourning what this perpetually online doomscrolling culture has stolen from them: the right to feel joy without guilt. The right to laugh without suspicion. The right to live in color, even while knowing the world is on fire. I am mourning the radiant possibilities of a generation who only like each other when they’re angry or sad. They think they’re making the world better like this, but they’re only making it worse.
Let yourselves laugh sincerely. Let yourselves dance unironically. Let yourselves know joy is not the enemy of justice.
Joy is why we want there to be justice in the first place.
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