By now, if you've spent literally any time engaging with us at all, you've likely noticed that we kind of like the phrases "moments of joy" and "adding a little disco to the details" and you may be wondering what they mean. As the beacons that drive our day to day lives and the core pillars of this company, we'll take up some space to really explain what they mean to us below.
For all intents and purposes, both sentiments can really be boiled down to one and the same thing, but we'll go a bit further into detail of what each means to us + how we see them impacting our lives. Before we can do that, we need to explain a bit more about some realizations that we've had recently that have changed our perspective on how we live our lives.
A Bit of Context
As 20-somethings living in 2022, our whole lives have been defined by pivotal cultural shifts + advances in technology. In the early years, it was still considered a rarity by many to have a cell phone, let alone a cell phone with any form of the internet on it and people worked off of one shared computer in their homes (likely in a designated "computer room"). Circles ran tight knit - your doorbell could ring at any moment with friends and family stopping by just because they're "in the neighborhood" and you didn't know much about celebrities' personal lives aside from whatever paparazzi shot went "viral" (aka plastered across magazine covers at the grocery store check-out). Life was simple - or truth be told, life was chaotic but simple when compared with today. Today, we're living in an era where everyone knows everything about everyone. Everything you see is advertising something or someone and even seemingly raw + unfiltered moments have a certain curation to them. One simple Google search can provoke hundreds of thousands of results in an instant and a post you share can reach people on the other side of the world and before you know it they can be chirping their opinions at you. There is no secrecy and intimacy to the "celebrity" any more when their influence has been diluted across a saturated market, filled with people sharing the most vulnerable moments of their lives to hundreds of thousands of followers every day and manipulating the version of themselves they want the world to see through little square images. Simply put, there is a lot more noise today than any other time in history and it can be all too easy to get lost in the dysfunction of it all. (Emma Chamberlain has a wonderful 3 episode podcast series ~starting with this linked episode~ that goes into great detail with all of this + is 10/10 worth a listen).
We're not claiming that today's era is any better or worse than previous times, just that it's different and something to be cognizant of. We're guilty of engaging and contributing to this version of society, just as much as the next guy. But with this in mind, we've started to seriously evaluate how we consume and how we create media. We've started asking ourselves a lot more "Why?" and "Who is this really for?" and from this ongoing, internal dialogue, we've defined a path forward for ourselves and our relationship with how we live our lives that can be boiled down to striving for "moments of joy", "living the full range of the human experience" and "adding a little disco to the details".
Moments of Joy + The Full Range of the Human Experience
The idea of personally living for moments of joy can be fully attributed for us to Indy Blue's blog post titled, "Girl, Indyrrupted". In this piece, she somehow captured the words + ideas that we've been feeling and experiencing for the last few years and never knew how to put to words. We urge you to read her post because she'll do a much better job at explaining it than we ever could, but our best attempt is to say that happiness is fleeting. The idea of "being happy" is something that every person is chasing but somehow has not nailed down, at least not in any tangible or permanent way. Somehow saying that out loud sounds depressing, but if you slow down to really, truly think about what happiness is, you'll uncover that it's part of (but not the whole of) the full range of the human experience. To feel and to feel deeply, is to really live - and that includes the good with the bad.
It's hard to put into words what the "full range of the human experience" means to us but the best way we know how to is through the feelings that come up when we're processing death. When someone we love dies, it's absolutely soul crushing and we're anything but happy in that moment (unless it's in the fake kind of way we tell ourselves we're happy that that person is not suffering anymore). But despite being completely and utterly unhappy, if we had a choice we would choose to have the experiences that we've had with them and to have lived the life that we've lived with them in it, in every lifetime and in every universe, even if it means that we'd be faced with that soul crushing feeling at the end of it, every time. Rather than running from those soul crushing feelings that come with the full range of the human experience, we're embracing them for what they are and instead chasing the moments of joy that bring balance to the spectrum.
At this point, you may be wondering what the difference is between joy and happiness and it could be argued that they're synonymous and in many ways they are, except that happiness is usually used to describe a suspended feeling, while joy is typically used to describe a destination. You'll hear people say the expression "I want to be happy", but rarely ever "I want to experience joy". So when we say we want to find a moment of joy every day, we mean to say that each day for any moment of time we want to experience the feeling of unparalleled joy ~ whether it be found in something as momentous as surprise fireworks on the skyline or something as seemingly small as using our favorite lip gloss (more on how we're finding moments of joy + its impact below). Our closing sentiment regarding moments of joy + the full range of the human experience is that a bad moment does not have to declare it a "bad day", in the same way that a moment of joy will not necessarily declare it a "good day". Again, at face value this may come off as pessimistic, but we mean it to say that moments don't have to define larger planes of existence, they can just be moments - you don't have to hold yourself to the feeling of "being happy" just because you received one good piece of news, just the same as you don't have to see your life as miserable when one bad thing happens. Understand that it's all part of the human experience and use it to motivate you to find the moments that elicit feelings of unfettered happiness + joy, while accepting that they'll be fleeting and filled with other feelings in the full spectrum of human emotion.
Adding a Little Disco to the Details
Now this one we can attribute fully to our own ideation. While still in the disco ball vase + candle making era of this small business, we couldn't help but notice that disco balls catch light and reflect it onto the surfaces around them (okay duh, that's the whole point of a disco ball), but we loved this idea and it got us thinking about how we can "add a little disco" to our lives. As natural planners, we've also always been extremely detail oriented and we hate to see a missed opportunity as the result of poor planning. Admittedly, this excessive need for planning has its major downfalls, such as how it can interfere with our ability to live spontaneously and with a laissez-faire attitude, or how we can get thrown totally off course when things don't go according to plan. Through therapy and a lot of self introspection, we've had to learn about how we can find a balance in these aspects, and though its a continuous + ever-evolving effort, we've found solace in using our compulsive planning to add value to our day-to-day lives through thoughtfully crafting ways to do the things we love most and baking in time for spontaneity.
We've come to recognize that research and well thought out plans, can often lend themselves well to 1) more moments of joy and 2) more opportunity to go with the flow. That may sound counter-intuitive, but think of it like this: when you want to have a fun evening out with friends, there is a lot more opportunity to do so when your night isn't thrown off course when you can't get seated without a reservation at your restaurant of choice and by the time you finally do finish dinner, there's a 3 hour wait to get into every bar. All of this to be said that adding a little disco to the details is about finding the joy in planning (even if they're loose plans) and allowing it to reflect onto many more joyous moments.
How Does It All Come Together
These realizations and north stars of living have been recent additions to our lives, but without fail, we can say that we've noticed a major shift in our overall life contentment (notice, we didn't say "happiness") already. Instead of living for the "next big thing" - the next weekend, the next trip, etc. (which let's face it, is usually few and far between) - we've pivoted to living for + creating moments of joy every day. Some days, this can amount to something pretty big and pretty damn wonderful, but other days, this just means that after working a 12 hour day, we experience unequivocal joy when our dog nuzzles up to us before we both pass out in bed. To us, this also means adding a little disco to the details - planning ahead and creating opportunity for spontaneity and creative freedom - itineraries packed with different ways to experience joy and walks at our favorite park on the days that we just don't have the time (or money, let's be real) to do so.
We've been focusing on shutting out the noise and trying to live with more intention behind everything that we do, everything that we post, everything that we consume. We strive to (but don't necessarily always succeed at) only ever adding value or consuming things of value. Some days, its a value-add to scroll aimlessly on TikTok or Instagram because it grants us the ability to detach for a moment and regroup, while other times we'll find that scrolling aimlessly is nothing but a value-suck, so living intentionally is about identifying what will fulfill us and when, and acknowledging that it's ever-evolving.
This blog, this platform, this brand is so so special to us and we'll continue using it for as long as it's a value-add, both to us and to other people. We recognize that we're not doing life changing work, we're hardly even sharing anything that couldn't be consumed elsewhere (after all, we're just consuming and subconsciously regurgitating other content that's being put out there), but if we can connect with just one person who's able to see what we're doing as a value-add, then it's enough for us to keep going. If we can create a community where people feel safe to confront the full range of the human experience, then we'll have fulfilled our goals in every sense of the idea.
Simply put, personally and professionally, we've shifted to live our lives for moments of joy, the full range of the human experience and in putting disco in the details. This means using a film camera even though it's arguably archaic and counterproductive, simply because it brings us joy. It means writing this blog post instead of doing the work that we had carved out for the day, even though it wasn't in the plans but we got struck with a wave of creative energy and thankfully have the flexibility to move around our agenda before we we hit our deadlines.
We'll be sharing more of how we're adding moments of joy and disco to the details most days through our Instagram , and we hope to inspire you to live a full life by doing so. We hope that this post and these sentiments resonated + were a value add for you and beg you to consider how you're living your life and how you find joy.
Some Moments of Joy We've Experienced Lately:
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