Kate Bowler can’t stand the term “influencer.”
As of the middle of March, the Duke Divinity School associate professor of religious history had 306,000 Instagram followers. She’s a New York Times bestselling author, whose topics include finding light in her own exceptionally difficult life. She’s open about the late-stage cancer that came at her a decade ago, at 35, and the surgeries and hospitalizations and years of medical interruptions that followed. Bowler is a public person with a sizable platform, yet she doesn’t want to be mistaken for an influencer. Her tradition as a public academic goes deeper than that, anyway.
“Both my parents were professors growing up,” Bowler says. “I watched the way they would do lectures.”
Her dad, for instance, would interrupt his own lectures with what Bowler describes as “mumbly, haranguing asides” about Tudor history. These seemed off-the-cuff, but were in fact scripted and very purposeful. He was leaning on a gift of his that he knew to be a gift, Bowler says, and exaggerated one of his strongest features into a memorable, authentic public performance. As a public person, Bowler also leans on her strengths – her role as one who teaches from authority in elite academia; her empathy; her high tolerance for vulnerability – and is careful and mindful of what she puts out into the world.
“If you do kind, smart, funny, you actually attract kind, smart, funny people,” she says matter-of-factly. “You should see the people who meet me on tour. They're all the same person. They’re slightly over-educated. They're deeply compassionate. They all have the same heart-forward, completely emotionally exhausting jobs. They're the dream.”
Blue Chair Conversation:
We talk days before Bowler’s tour for her latest book, “Joyful, Anyway”(releasing April 7 on The Dial Press). Bowler writes with nuance and sensitivity about the particularly elusive sensation of joy and how it waits in ambush in the chaotic ecosystem of real life. Social scientists can quantify happiness, can quantify bliss, she says, but joy defies explanation. It can sneak up on people during horrific tragedy. It’s less tied to societal comfort and economic luck than happiness. It’s an often random full-body eruption of existential positivity. And yet so many of us have felt it.
“Joy is an actual mystery,” Bowler says. And she sat down with us to talk about it.
This interview has been edited for length.
DukeMag: I'm curious about process. Joyful, Anyway has episodic chapters, and then lists, and then chapters that read like sermons, but it builds to a coherent whole. How did that come about?
Kate Bowler: I think one of the great joys of writing, particularly a book like this, is that there isn't really a genre for part memoir, part cultural commentary. And as a historian of these popular scripts about health, wealth and happiness, I just decided a while ago that the one of the most amazing things you can do is just let your research brain and your emotional experience take you somewhere that you haven't seen in a book before.
It's a book that is not self-help, even though it has practical wisdom, but it will be likely put in a self-help category. I've got two decades worth of research and interests and interviews that I feel very comfortable weaving in and out of.
I love being able to write a book that no one gives you permission to write.
DM: You write, “joy goes all the way down.” Then again, you can't cause it in your life. It's accidental. It comes out of weird times that sometimes should be the most distressing times. Can you talk about why joy is so unusual?
KB: Joy is this bright, enlivening feeling that it feels like a jolt that brings us to a new awareness of our circumstance. It's a cousin to all sorts of different emotions that we know better.
We know bliss. It's like joy, but it escapes your reality. Happiness is a sense of ease. It's a sense of circumstantial alignment. It's a contentedness that comes from, frankly, a lot of luck. It's much more natural to create social science studies around correlations between, say, going to bed at a particular time, making eye contact with your loved one, yoga, hydration. There are all kinds of ways in which we can map incremental, emotional, positive experiences. But joy is unusual because it's not just a feeling, it's a story. It has an existential claim on us. It asks us to say something about the goodness of our lives, regardless of circumstances, and that's what I think is so slippery and shocking about joy as a claim.
The truth is, it's controversial because it's not well studied. And even when you ask someone to recount a joyful moment, they do feel confused about whether they're being asked to describe something every day, which joy is not every day. The truth is, I don't believe in everyday joys. I think that's just mild bursts of happiness or contentment or gratitude. Joy is an enormous and expansive feeling that happens to us only occasionally, and because of that, it's very tricky to study.
DM: Why did you want to write a book about something that's very tricky to study, especially from the perspective of someone who's had an uncommonly difficult time of things?
KB: The throughline to my work is that I really hate being lied to. When I feel like I have reached for something good, and it turns out it wasn't true, I have felt the weight of that in my own life. [Assurances] for instance, that everything happens for a reason, or that life should have been better by now, or that everything is a lesson. When I try to imagine what a constructive vision of what a beautiful, rich, meaningful life would be, I felt almost immediately allergic to all the solutions.
It seemed very clear to me that happiness is not possible for a lot of people who are unlucky and also not middle class. Happiness is incredibly expensive as a life proposition. The way it's sold to women makes me truly insane.
What can we offer people that's free, that is immune to despair, even though we might often despair? I know that [joy is] real because I've seen it in my own life, and it's something I would feel comfortable promising other people. That's something I can say about very few things. What can you actually promise another person who's going through an awful experience? I believe that we can promise them joy.
DM: A lot of the people who you talked to for this book have been through horrific experiences. How did you decide these were the people you're going to reach out to?
KB: That's who I'm surrounded by because this center that I run, the Everything Happens Initiative, is run not just as a Duke project, but as a community of people who have had enormous befores and afters in their lives. That's the community we sustain. The people who work with me are trained pastors and social workers. I did that on purpose so that we could be the kind of responsive community that I would have wanted when I was sick.
A writer named Margaret Feinberg called it the “fellowship of the afflicted.” Those are the people I really trust not to lie, not to over-promise, and also to hunger for something that is capable of carrying us. It's not that I don't like happy people, but I don't trust happy people to tell me where to go next.
DM: You write a lot about the ache. Philosophers and theologians have a real depth of research on the ache. Am I getting the correct sense there?
KB: I think that's right. It's a theory about the human condition. In the Christian tradition in which I teach and belong, there has always been excellent language for our experience of incompleteness, for our restlessness, for our hunger. [The ache] is not a glitch in the system, but it is the system itself. It is what it means to be human, to have all of this want.
DM: Does joy feel random to you?
KB: I think it is random. And I think that it is also part of our homework, our moral homework, to become people who have the capacity to be more and more joyful. It’s like lung capacity. When it happens, we are there. We are the first to breathe it in.