A giant roadside sculpture of a mosquito in Komarno, Man. If you want to get off the highway of your problems, you need to find the gravel roads, writes Kate Bowler.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Kate Bowler’s most recent book is Joyful, Anyway. Originally from Winnipeg, she is a professor of history at Duke University and hosts the podcast Everything Happens.
These are dark times. Democracy is under attack. Canada is caught between hegemons. The Arctic sits waiting to be plundered. The economy flounders. There’s war in the Middle East. What makes joy possible, even now?
I have a simple answer to that: Manitoba. Or, at the very least, the World’s Largest Statues of the greater Winnipeg area.
For the last few years, I have been studying the nature of joy. What makes joy? As a historian and a theologian, I’ve been trying to understand the mysterious nature of the way that joy – that bright, enlivening emotion – can break into our lives.
Joy eludes many of us. I have been a human bulldozer since I was a child growing up on the prairies. My parents once returned home to Winnipeg from a trip to discover that I had renovated and staged their entire basement (“Did you know that wood panelling can be painted? I organized your record collection. I hope you weren’t attached to the treadmill. It didn’t work with the new floor plan.”) Back from my American college for a weekend, I came extremely close to signing the paperwork for a cabin in Lake of the Woods they did not yet realize they needed. Had they ever really considered the benefits of a four-door Toyota sedan? I oscillated between considerate and wildly presumptuous as I streamlined our processes, refined everyone’s preferences, and compressed more and more activities into smaller units of time like a human trash compactor.
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I always wondered if I felt so at home in America because of its famous love of efficiency, an ideal untarnished since the Industrial Revolution. Workers of all kinds dramatically improve outputs by behaving like cogs in a human machine. The virtues of mass production are seductive. Speed. Productivity. Growth. When I explain this to my divinity students, I try to sound ominous. The church labour my students are preparing for is slow and inefficient. Most of their week will be spent trying to offer kindness to a deacon who never liked you or weeding heresies out of the Sunday School material you bought online. You’ll spend days coming up with enough beauty and truth to fill an hour on Sunday only to receive a dozen comments from parishioners on their way out the door about how much they miss the old pastor.
If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church. I say this with great solemnity before I rush off to a faculty meeting, where I will answer e-mails with a lot of vigorous nodding to demonstrate my attentiveness to the agenda. I deftly outmanoeuvre such joys as mid-afternoon naps in my attempt to winnow my inbox down to zero, record another podcast episode, and immerse my son in Canadian folk music. I am a magician with a single trick: gather round and watch how this woman can take a solitary moment and divide it into a million uses!
But no one has seen me worship at the altar of productivity more than my husband. When I woke up one morning with a stuffy nose and sore throat, I accidentally took the wrong pills. Instead of the non-drowsy decongestant (a cheerful yellow pill), I had taken the nighttime edition. My husband found me sobbing over the toilet, desperately attempting to gag myself at 7 a.m.
“It was green! The pill was green, not blue!” I protested, half laughing and mostly crying.
“Why can’t you just take a nap?” he asked sensibly.
“I have so much work I want to get done! WHY? WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME?”
It was intoxicating, at first, to imagine that I could be more and more like the machines meant to improve us. But we have been watching the sunset of the postwar American consensus for some time now, and we see the long shadows it has created. Division. Confusion. New forms of conspiracy and autocracy. And we are afraid. We fear that we are creeping up the edge of environmental extinction, that we see the fissures of our democracy causing us to worry less about ugly arguments at the dinner table and more about the peaceful transfer of power, that we have lost most forms of intimacy to heavily surveilled forms of digital servitude. It is impossible now to maintain technological confidence without qualification, since the very systems designed to increase efficiency have also exposed and monetized our fragility.
In the meantime, the language of optimization migrated from factory floors to fitness trackers, from supply chains to selfhood. We audit our sleep. We quantify our moods. We speak of “maximizing” time with our children. Even rest is recast as strategic recovery. We do not know how to extend our happiness without duplicating the most absurd forms of pretending not to be human at all.
There is a necessary form of happiness that cannot be given to us by machines. And it happens when we abandon efficiency as a goal. In fact, it requires that we do not take, like a human bulldozer, the shortest path between two points.
It is joy and it requires detours.
While happiness is a sense of ease, joy jolts us awake. Truthfully, joy is unbelievably annoying to study because it is wildly unpredictable, and therefore cannot be pinned down in a lab. Joy can appear at a funeral, in the hospital, or, in my case, in the midst of a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. While you can’t be happy and sad at the same time, you can be joyful and sad at the same time, which is a neat trick. Joy can co-exist with our most difficult emotions – pain, grief, anxiety – because joy is a moment that also tells us an existential truth: that it is good to be alive.
Because joy is impossible to schedule, you have to find the preconditions of joy, ways that try to make joy more available or possible to show up. And one of the easiest ways to put yourself in the way of joy is to get out of your routines. Abandon your efficiencies. Joy feels like a surprise, so find ways to be surprise-able.
There is a habit of joy that I developed growing up in Manitoba, which became really important to me in difficult seasons of life.
Canada is one of the greatest – if not the greatest – country on Earth, but it will never say so. Canada is a middle power with middle-child syndrome. As a child of the 1980s, I grew up watching Saved by the Bell and thought a great deal about the inner lives of California teenagers because we were all forced to watch American culture on repeat. Though I faithfully practised my overhead clapping in preparation to be a contestant on Kidstreet, I knew that whatever anyone believed to be important was probably not happening in Winnipeg. Think you matter? Try moving to the United States and realizing that saying “We’re north of North Dakota” will only prompt the question: “Where is North Dakota?”
But I return to Manitoba every summer to see my family and to noodle around. Whenever I was going through something difficult in my life, I found that I could go on a little adventure, take my mind off of things, and give myself time to process. If you want to get off the highway of your problems, you need to find the gravel roads.
A large ox-and-cart statue in Winnipeg’s Assiniboine Park. Manitoba claims more than 60 such roadside attractions, giving it one of the highest per-capita “giant thing” densities in the nation.Shannon VanRaes/The Globe and Mail
Some places boast oceans or mountains. Manitoba has the world’s largest curling rock, a giant mosquito, a giant pumpkin, a giant ox-cart, a giant turtle, and, of course, the majestic Coca-Cola can made out of an abandoned water tower looming like postapocalyptic deities over roads off the Trans-Canada Highway. Though often dismissed as fantasy, absurdity is not a distraction from real life. Absurdity is one of the last refuges of the human soul in an age that treats us like machines. Algorithms crave efficiency. Systems want optimization. But human beings – wonderfully, tragically – need the unnecessary. Absurdity is how we remember that the world is more than problems to solve.
The places that have saved me again and again have rarely been the destinations themselves. Manitoba road trips have always been the through line of my life – how I’ve coped with heartbreak, confusion, change, and the general humiliations of being human. When someone I love was dating a lying, cheating disaster of a man, we put his belongings in garbage bags and threw them in the parking lot. And then we did what we always do: we got in the car. We followed signs that read “Perogies 100 km … 50 km … 10 km …” until we found ourselves standing before a woman who explains that the perogies are in her freezer downstairs in her home nearby and actually, sorry, there’s none left.
Joy is not the same as happiness or positive thinking or an emotional upgrade. Joy is that sudden, surprising sense that existence is still good – even now. It sneaks up on us. Joy can co-exist with grief, uncertainty, boredom and frustration. It interrupts us, pulls us back into our lives for a moment. Joy is relational, embodied and always slightly absurd. It’s the flicker of colour in an otherwise grey day, the technicolour moment that catches us off guard.
When I am standing underneath the World’s Second Largest Fire Hydrant created on a whim by volunteer firefighters, I am reminded that these are some of the last places where joy is still allowed to sneak in. We are living in an age of relentless optimization and apocalyptic fragility. But if we are to have reminders of what it means to be human, perhaps we might pursue joy that is gloriously, unapologetically wasteful. Your joy will not scale. Your joy cannot be optimized. And it will do nothing to improve your productivity metrics or your morning routine.
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Manitoba is, at its heart, a province that delights in its detours. We are stitched together by farm roads, tiny towns and an unspoken understanding that a Brobdingnagian pumpkin can be the reason for fall itself. Manitoba alone claims more than 60 rural roadside attractions, giving us one of the highest per-capita “giant thing” densities in the nation. We may be a “have-not” province in conventional economic terms, but we are abundantly blessed in giant moose, enormous catfish, gargantuan snowmen and titanic beverage cans. These are our cathedrals of nonsense, our monuments to delight.
The philosophers tell us that meaning is found in truth, beauty, and goodness. I would add a fourth category: the magnificently ridiculous. These side trips, these boondoggles, these wildly unnecessary landmarks are one way of staying human in a world increasingly structured to make us efficient at the cost of our souls.
Joy lives on the detours. It lives in the places where we let ourselves be interrupted, where we choose delight over duty, where we remember – perhaps for the first time all week – that being human is not a problem to solve. And in the meantime, the World’s Largest Garter Snake Mating Pits in Narcisse, Man., (off Highway 17; turn east at the entrance sign and follow the short road to the parking lot) are only a few weeks away from being peak orgy. What a time to be alive.