Letter #131: The Science of Joy

Mining life for awesome sauce.

Pops,

Recently our conversation has helped me to see something. One of the best life hacks you ever taught me was to think of discipline in terms of what you get instead of what you give up. This is counterintuitive. The most obvious thing you feel on a diet is hunger; you notice the blue cheese dip you’re not eating at the football game or the bear claw you’re not buying at the mall. 

It’s extremely easy to go from focusing on what you give up for virtue to equating virtue with giving things up. I’m being so good, you think, because I’m not scrolling Pornhub or not taking another shot or not letting Netflix slide into the next episode. Not, not, not, no no no. But the no has value only as a signpost to a better yes.

As God’s prophet Thomas Sowell observed, life is tradeoffs. We give things away to get things: the strain of exercise for the vigor of strength. Sexual self-control for a richer love life. Noticing this is an absolute game-changer for motivation, because it lets you get into the business of mining life for awesome sauce rather than bludgeoning yourself repeatedly over the head with an anvil.

So now that we’ve arrived at thinking about faith as the science of joy, I start to see why talk of sin often feels like dreary scolding. It’s so easy to get the impression that not doing stuff, and suffering while not doing it, and then feeling bad for failing not to do it, is the point. When really all good counsel against sin is just a matter of clearing away obstacles: “let us cast aside every burden of sin that clings to us so easily and run the race.”

I mentioned earlier the Hebrew concept of avah, “twisting” or “deviation.” The opposite of avah is yashar, the straight-shot path of God. And pastors love to point out that hamartia, the Greek word we render as “sin,” really means aiming off target. It’s a translation of the Hebrew chata’, which is the opposite of God’s law or torah—i.e., the bulls-eye aim of a master sharpshooter. Repentance is a course correction, good not for its own sake but for the road it gets you back on.

In other words the “deadly sins” could just as easily be called the “fatal distractions.” It’s not that your wrath is without cause: it might be totally justified! But stewing in your anger—or your pet lusts, or your creature comforts—will turn you into Gollum with the ring, cooing at the glint of a bauble deep in your cave while the sun grows dim outside. Bad tradeoff.

Myself, I’ll take the awesome sauce. “All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses,” gripes Screwtape, are “like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.” Whatever I have to trade in to get that, I’m in.

Love,
Spencer