The Price of Joy

Joy is the most expensive thing you can buy. Money is the cheapest price you could pay for joy.

Joy is expensive because you cannot experience joy in a life you have stripped of the unexplainable, the unpredictable, and the unknown.

Most people are willing to kill themselves every day to avoid the unexplainable, the unpredictable, or the unknown—they are willing to live a life as dull, drab, and mediocre as their imaginations and best efforts can provide, until the day their body stops working. People are willing to be a zombie, and I say this as someone who practices vodou, as long as it means their misery today is as much as possible the same as yesterday, because it is better to be miserable than it is to be unpredictable.

The price of joy is fundamental discomfort, but more than that, the willingness to learn that what you think is control is a lie. The willingness to experience the unexplainable without trying to explain it, the unpredictable without trying to predict it, and the unknown without trying to know it.

There is a death in that, too: a death of the ego, a death of the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, and a fundamental willingness to let lies be lies. To refuse to justify, to rationalize, to soothe.

You have to be willing to let your life burn down around you, so that you can be free.

And you need someone to strike the match.