Joy Zadie Smith Analysis

According to Google, the word pleasure is defined as “a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment,” while the word joy is defined as “a feeling of great pleasure and happiness.” However, a dictionary definition is not merely as complex, subjective, and versatile as human emotions and experiences – though, it does provide a basic generalization of how most people perceive and process different feelings, emotions, and moods. Author, Zadie Smith, respectively, analyzes and differentiates between pleasure and joy and distinctively separates the two with regards to their quality and quantity. As she explains, pleasure most closely refers to a temporary state of satisfaction and contentment, it can be easily forgotten, and is often times preferred

To Zadie Smith, joy, unlike pleasure, is not a sub-category of happiness; but is rather something so delirious that thinking about it (or rather reminiscing about it) somehow dements and destroys the feeling entirely, allowing the feeling to be devoured by its potential negative consequences or side effects. Simply put, Smith believes that pleasure can be romanticized, while joy cannot; and although that may be the case on the surface, her acute intellectual analysis and assessment reveals that joy in its truest and purest form is what every human being should strive for in order to reach bliss or a perfect state of

As Smith explains, I find joy to be some kind of unhappiness and grief, a distinguishable feeling of bittersweet nostalgia and longing that she deems as a dangerous and slippery slope once someone allows himself/herself to delve deeply into it. As insane as joy seems, I find myself wanting it, since most of my life experiences to this moment seem more like pleasure than joy. Perhaps because the ultimate disposability and evanescence of pleasure seems rather representative of my generation’s increasing awareness of the general fleetingness of things, and their skepticism of all the tropes (a house, a family, a career, the suburban life…) previously associated (mostly via Hollywood and other mass media) with a “joyous” life. My generation is one that has grown up seeing about half of all marriages end in divorce. We’ve seen the real estate market and the stock market collapse a few times, and have been brought up in a world where natural disasters, terrorism and apocalyptic doom are not feared as much as expected. Because we have grown up in the age of market instability, escalating debt and climate change, we are much more desirous of short-term satisfaction and contentment. We’d rather travel, eat amazing food, see movies, have adventures, and live via moment-by-moment tweets and Insta-documents, quickly forgotten; we’d rather live in the