What If Joy Is Part of What We Should Be Optimizing?

Celebrating My Dad's 94th Birthday at the Wedgewood Hotel In Downtown Vancouver

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My dad is 94 years old.

Every morning, without fail, he says his rosary. His faith has always been an important part of his life.

Every day, he goes for a walk through the beautiful nature of Vancouver Island, where my parents live. He loves a game of cards and, more often than not, still manages to beat everyone by a landslide. He played golf until he was about 88, when he decided he no longer wanted to play a game he loved if he couldn't play it well.

And my dad loves dessert.

He eats it pretty much every day.

For much of his life, he was a farmer. It was hard, physical work, and he did it until he was in his early 50s. He didn't think about functional movement or cardiovascular fitness. His body moved because his life required it to move.

And we ate what we grew.

As kids, much of the food on our table came directly from the farm. We were eating what today we'd proudly label organic—we just didn't know it.

It wasn't a wellness strategy.

It was dinner.

My dad has never tracked his steps. He doesn't know his VO₂ max. He has never wondered whether his daily walk qualifies as Zone 2 cardio.

And he laughs.

A lot.

The more I think about my dad, the more I realize something:

My dad has built himself one hell of a wellness program. He just never consciously knew he was doing it.

Movement. Nature. Faith. Purpose. Family. Play. Laughter. Pleasure. Food grown from the earth.

He didn't choose these things because someone told him they might extend his life.

They were simply woven into the architecture of his life.

My aunt also lived well into her 90s.

She spent much of her adult life overweight and, by the visual standards of modern wellness culture, someone might have looked at her and immediately seen something that needed improving.

That's not what I remember.

I remember one of the happiest human beings I have ever known.

I remember her smiling. I remember how much she loved her family. I remember how much she loved being a teacher—and how much her students loved her. I remember someone who seemed genuinely delighted to be participating in her own life.

Neither my dad's longevity nor my aunt's proves anything about what makes someone live a long life. There are far too many variables involved for that.

But my dad's life—and my memories of my aunt's—have made me increasingly curious about something:

What if we've defined an optimized life far too narrowly?

What We Can Measure

We are living in an extraordinary time for health and wellness.

We can measure our sleep. Glucose. Heart-rate variability. Muscle mass. Bone density.

Cardiovascular fitness. Protein intake. Steps. Recovery. And an ever-growing collection of biological markers.

And that's a good thing.

I believe in the science.

I believe strength matters as we age. I believe in nourishing our bodies, protecting our sleep, moving regularly and understanding the things that can help us remain strong, healthy and independent.

But somewhere along the way, optimization seems to have become almost synonymous with what we can quantify.

And I wonder if that definition is incomplete.

Because there are other things happening inside a human life that aren't nearly as easy to capture on a dashboard.

Joy.

Purpose.

Belonging.

Faith.

Laughter.

Love.

Pleasure.

Connection.

The feeling of standing somewhere in nature and realizing you don't particularly want to be anywhere else.

We have become very good at measuring the things that are easy to measure—and perhaps not nearly good enough at valuing the things that make us want to live.

What If Joy Counts Too?

We tend to think about joy as something separate from physical health.

Health is serious.

Joy is nice.

Health belongs in the wellness plan.

Joy is what happens when we have time left over.

But what if that distinction doesn't make sense?

What if joy isn't simply something we experience when we're healthy? What if joy is one of the things that helps make us healthy?

There is science that gives us reason to take that question seriously.

Researchers tend to study concepts such as positive affect and positive well-being rather than joy alone. And our biology is considerably more complicated than the popular idea that happiness simply releases a handful of “feel-good chemicals.”

But our emotional and physical states aren't separate systems.

Research has associated positive emotional states with physiological processes involving our stress response, cardiovascular system, and immune and inflammatory function.

Studies have also found relationships between positive well-being, purpose and physical-health outcomes.

None of that means joy prevents disease.

It doesn't mean that people who become ill simply weren't happy enough.

And it certainly doesn't mean eating dessert every day is my father's secret longevity protocol—although at 94, I'm fairly certain he'd be happy to participate in that clinical trial.

It simply raises a question I think deserves more attention:

Have we underestimated the value of joy—not only for our mental and emotional well-

being, but for our physical well-being too?

Because if we have, joy doesn't belong on the periphery of the wellness conversation.

It belongs somewhere much closer to the center.

Maybe My Dad Has Been Optimizing All Along

Look at my father's life through that lens.

He walks every day.

But he doesn't walk because he's chasing a step count.

He loves being outside.

He spent decades doing physically demanding work.

But he wasn't exercising.

He was farming.

We ate food grown on that farm.

But we weren't trying to eat organic.

We were eating dinner.

He played golf well into his 80s.

Not because golf appeared on a healthy-aging checklist.

He loved the game.

He says his rosary every morning.

Not because he's read research about spirituality, stress or longevity.

He has faith.

He plays cards.

Not for cognitive optimization.

He loves playing cards.

He eats dessert.

Not because I can make any scientifically credible argument whatsoever for its inclusion in a longevity protocol.

He loves dessert.

And he laughs.

He enjoys his family. He enjoys nature. He plays. He believes. He moves. He has rituals. He

has things he looks forward to.

And when I look at all of this together, I see his life a little differently.

My dad hasn't spent 94 years failing to optimize his life.

At 94, he is still optimizing the hell out of it.

He just optimizes for a broader set of outcomes.

Health, yes.

But also meaning.

Connection.

Movement.

Faith.

Nature.

Play.

Pleasure.

And joy.

The Hike That Changes Nothing

This makes me wonder about motivation, too.

Imagine being told that you could follow a particular exercise or wellness program for the next year and receive meaningful health benefits from it—but your body would look exactly the same at the end.

Would you be equally motivated to do it?

Now think about someone who loves hiking.

Tell her that hiking will never change the shape of her body.

Would she stop hiking?

Probably not.

Because changing her body was never why she walked into the woods in the first place.

The hike is the reward.

She loves the trees. The air. The views. The quiet. The feeling of moving through the world.

She doesn't need to manufacture motivation to return to something she loves.

Joy creates its own reason to return.

And maybe that's another way we've underestimated joy.

We spend enormous amounts of energy figuring out how to make ourselves comply with behaviors that are good for us.

What if we spent a little more time discovering the things that are good for us that we also genuinely love?

That doesn't mean every healthy behavior has to be enjoyable. It won't be.

And it doesn't mean ignoring evidence-based recommendations because we don't particularly enjoy them.

But surely there is value in building a life that contains plenty of things we don't have to force

ourselves to do because we can't wait to do them.

Maybe We’ve Defined Optimization Too Narrowly

Perhaps the problem isn't that we've become too interested in optimizing our health.

Perhaps we've defined optimization too narrowly.

Of course I want strong bones as I age.

I want muscle.

I want cardiovascular health.

I want restorative sleep.

I want to nourish my body in ways that support it.

I want to understand the science.

But I also want to laugh.

I want to love people.

I want to be in nature.

I want meaningful work.

I want to play the piano.

I want to practice yoga.

I want long conversations with friends.

I want time with my family.

I want moments that serve absolutely no measurable purpose other than making me ridiculously happy to be alive.

And maybe those things shouldn't sit at the bottom of the wellness hierarchy anymore

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Maybe an optimized life isn't one in which we've perfected every measurable variable.

Maybe it's one in which we build physical health and emotional health. Strength and connection. Purpose and pleasure. Longevity and joy.

So perhaps alongside asking:

What can I do today that might help me live longer?

We should also be asking:

What makes me want to live longer?

What do I love?What gives my life meaning?

Who makes me laugh?

Where do I feel most alive?

What do I want to keep coming back to?

What makes me glad I'm here?

Because perhaps the healthiest life isn't simply the one that lasts the longest.

Perhaps it's the one we actually want to keep living.

My dad may have figured that out without ever trying.

He has built himself one hell of a wellness program.

He just calls it his life. ❤️