The Inevitability of Joy

Why I Believe Joy Is Inevitable

My new book is called The Inevitability of Joy: Higher Consciousness, Better Systems. Happier People.  That subtitle is the whole thesis in a breath. Here's where it comes from.

In April of 1979, a friend told me I had to meet two women. They were coming through Chagrin Falls, Ohio, so I drove over from Kent to spend a day with them. Their names were Arleen Lorrance and Diane Pike, and I was never the same again.

They handed me a set of principles that day, the Love Principles, including this one: be the change you want to see happen, instead of trying to change anyone else. You've probably heard that attributed to Gandhi. It wasn't Gandhi. It was Arleen, who put it into the world in 1972 and has been living it ever since. But what struck me more than the principles was the two women themselves. I had never met people that happy: fully present, fully alive, laughing louder and more often than anyone I'd ever known.

When I told them I wanted to travel the country with my thumb, they handed me a list of people they called their love family. I spent that summer hitchhiking west, and found again and again that a ride showed up, a door opened, the next thing appeared right when I needed it. It was my first real practice of trusting life.

That's where the book begins. It's not where it ends.

The Inevitability of Joy makes an argument I've spent forty years testing, first in my own life, then across a hundred communities through my poverty-reduction work. In one sentence: the world is better than we're told and getting better still as rising wealth and health free more of us to pursue meaning and community, which is why building toward enough money, enough meaning, and enough friends, for everyone, is worth starting now.

I know how that sounds. Thoughtful friends push back hard: isn't the world going to hell in a handbasket? The book takes that seriously, because the feeling behind it is real even when the conclusion isn't. We carry a negativity bias, and there's enormous money in keeping us afraid and divided. The gap between what's actually true about human progress and what most of us believe has become one of the biggest obstacles to the progress still ahead. People who believe the world is getting worse don't build. They retreat.

So the book is two things at once: a case, built on evidence, that joy can be our baseline rather than a lucky accident, and a blueprint for the better systems (in how we work, give, retire, and care for one another) that make better lives possible. Happier you, happier world.

The story framing all of it is more personal than any I've told publicly. That summer led me back to Ohio, where I met a kind, beautiful woman named Jan. Forty-four years of marriage followed. Jan died on January 23, 2024. This book lives between those two bookends: the summer I learned to trust life, and the loss that tested everything I thought I'd learned.

I'll leave you with the question the book keeps returning to. The shift toward a more joyful world isn't a wish, it's the direction that things are already moving. The only question is whether you'll be one of the people helping it arrive.

Be Happy,

Scott

Purchase Book here