Joyful Anyway: Surviving the Sh*t Show of Regular Life | Kate Bowler

**Dan Harris** (0:03)
Hey, gang, welcome to the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. Today, we're talking about how when you live an overly regimented, optimized, metrics-driven life, it can be what my guest calls a joy blocker.
That's one of the things we're going to talk about. We're also going to talk about the fact that we all have, whether we're aware of it or not, a deep hunger or ache. That deep hunger or ache can actually be a kind of compass and tell us what we want to live for, what we want to fill that hole with. My guest is Kate Bowler, PhD who is a four-time New York Times bestselling author. Her latest book is called Joyful Anyway, and that's the book we're going to focus on in this interview. She's also a podcaster. She's got a podcast called Everything Happens. This interview is a ton of fun. There's a lot of laughing and joking and also a lot of profundity. I think you're going to enjoy it. Kate Bowler, after the break.
Kate Bowler, welcome to the show.

**Kate Bowler** (1:04)
I'm so glad to be here.

**Dan Harris** (1:07)
Glad to have you here. If you're comfortable, I'd love to start with a little bit of your personal backstory.
You don't come to Joy through the front door.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:19)
That's a great way of putting it.

**Kate Bowler** (1:21)
No, I had to climb through a back window and then find a fire escape.

**Dan Harris** (1:26)
We're laughing about it, but the story is tough. Again, if you're comfortable with it, I'd love to hear it.

**Kate Bowler** (1:31)
I had a pretty straightforward hope for my life. I just wanted to be an academic. I just really wanted to be a professor in a tower with many gargoyles. My parents were university professors. When I got this job at Duke University right out of grad school, it was beyond anything I could imagine.
It was just one of those seasons of life where it feels like it's three steps forward, five steps back, eight steps forward. You're trying very hard to do the math and some things come together and some things come apart. I really wanted to have a baby and I was struggling through years of infertility.
I really wanted to do a good job at this amazing opportunity, but I found I had really terrible chronic pain that meant that I lost use of my arms for a couple years which was not like peak season for voice dictation at that time. So it was just like everything was more than a grind, more than a slog. It was like always pressing against the limits of despair. And then I just had this one season where all of a sudden everything came together. I had this like perfect little smushy baby that smelled like applesauce and cookies. And I had married my high school sweetheart and like things. I published my first book. It was called Blessed. I was so excited. And it's just like a whole season in the sun where everything was really beautiful. And my life felt like it was adding up to something meaningful to me.
And then I started getting weird stomach pain and I went to the doctor for six months and was sent home with like Pepto-Bismol. And then one day I was like, no, I'm serious. Like the pain is truly unbearable. I'm not leaving until you get me a different scan. And then I got a call in my office the next day that I had stage four colon cancer and that I probably wouldn't like live through that year or the next. And that was like the very, it was like that really marked the end of a life that I really loved and that I thought I'd worked for.

**Dan Harris** (3:45)
You had worked for it.
And yet life knows how to throw a right hook. In this case, several of them. And yet you're here, which I'm happy about.

**Kate Bowler** (3:58)
I'm actually a hologram.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:00)
And this is a very realistic AI experience. Surprise.

**Dan Harris** (4:05)
The tech is good.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:06)
It's amazing, wow.

**Dan Harris** (4:09)
So when was the diagnosis? And I don't know much about the stages of cancer, notwithstanding the fact that my dad was an oncologist. But I think four is the worst one.

**Kate Bowler** (4:22)
You can't graduate to five.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:24)
Five is just not, is not aliveness, yeah.

**Kate Bowler** (4:27)
Four is like, it's spread everywhere and is likely, just it has spread beyond the original organ. And stage four colon cancer was at the time not a great prognosis. I spent really two years very intensely doing chemotherapy and immunotherapy. So they kept giving me sort of three months and then I'd get another scan, and I'd find out if I'd get another three months to live. And I just kind of went like that vine to vine for several years. And then eventually they realized, wow, this immunotherapy is really working.