Ten Hours at a Desk, and Where the Joy Actually Showed Up

Ten Hours at a Desk, and Where the Joy Actually Showed Up

I can sit at my desk for ten hours straight, in flow the entire time, and not think about happiness once.

I'm thinking about progress. Moving the thing forward. And somewhere along the way I started treating progress and happiness as the same word, which they aren't, and I've been slower to work that out than I'd like.

That day isn't empty, though. The joy is in there. It just doesn't arrive until the end.

I run my reflection at night, look back at those ten hours, and something lands. Not a feeling I had during. A feeling I get from having done it. Some version of look at what I can do, said quietly, to myself.

Runners know this one. You train for months and the race itself is mostly pain and hunger and none of it is fun, and then you cross the line and there's this thing waiting on the other side that makes the whole ugly middle worth it. Outdoor people call it type two fun. Miserable while it's happening, great afterward.

That's what a ten-hour build day is for me. The payoff is real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

The problem with getting paid at the end

Here's where it stops being a nice observation about myself.

Jana is in the same race. Slightly different lane, same race, and she's traveling it right next to me.

And my payoff comes at the end of the day, silently, in a journal, in a currency she can't spend. She doesn't get any of it in real time. What she gets in real time is a guy at a desk with his head down who isn't laughing.

So I get to feel fine about a day she experienced as flat. I got paid. She watched me not get paid.

That's not fair to her and it took me until this week to see it that way.

What came out during the recording

Jana has been writing "I want to experience laughter" in her journal. Every day. For two years.

I have never once written it down.

The easy version of this is that I didn't know. That's not it. I've heard her say laughter. I've heard her say fun and joy. Those words have been in the room the whole time.

What I never did was ask what she actually meant by them. What laughter looks like for her, what it's for, what she's actually after when she says it.

We do this practice every morning in the same house. We've built a business on it. And when we talk about what we wrote down, we talk about the business, so two years of her writing the same word went by with me hearing it and never once picking it up.

I don't have a clever way to wrap that up. It's just true and I've been sitting with it since we stopped recording.

Here's what makes it more complicated. I'm not doing the thing where a guy pretends he hates his work.

I love building this. It's fun for me. I can see where it's going and I can see the impact it's having, and sitting at that desk figuring out how to move it forward is something I'd choose.

So it isn't that work stole my joy. It's that I put short-term blinders on in service of a long-term thing I want, and what falls off the edges is laughter and play and general goofing around, which I also love. I just don't miss those until somebody says the word, or until I'm running my reflection at the end of the day and notice what wasn't in it.

Jana and I think differently, express differently, and recharge differently. That's most of a marriage. But different doesn't mean I get to not learn hers.

And it means my type two fun doesn't cover both of us. It pays me at the end of the day. It doesn't pay her at all.

Somewhere in there I lost the laughing

The other thing Jana said, which stung a little, is that laughter is my genius and I keep putting it on the back burner.

She's right. I go into what she calls professorial mode. Work mode. I get so wrapped up in figuring out how to move something forward that I don't look up, and I stop being funny, and I'm apparently not much fun to be in a room with.

She's been catching herself with the same face. Her word for it is worse than mine and I'm not going to repeat what my husband duties allow me to say about my wife's face in public.

We tried to fix it, sort of. Jana signed up for a stand-up comedy class. It did not go the way either of us hoped and she'll tell you about it herself on the episode.

I'd have been no better. Scripted funny has never worked for me. Somebody says be funny now, on this stage, on cue, and everything in my head goes quiet.

She's also tried getting around more people, and reports back that the people we're around are somehow even more serious than we are. Very cerebral, she says. Cerebral people.

That word sounds like a breakfast food.

The golden year

Here's the part that makes all of this a little embarrassing.

We already ran this experiment. All of 2025 we took off from the business to ski. The whole year. We called it the golden year and it was one of the best years of our lives, and Jana became a world champion in it.

Then business picked back up and we forgot the whole thing inside of a few months.

But here's what I got wrong about the golden year until this week.

I'd been remembering it as the year we stopped working. That's not what made it work. What made it work is that we ran on a different fuel. Laughter, play, adventure, the whole thing was the engine rather than the reward at the end of the engine.

And that fuel isn't only available on a sabbatical. It's available any day of the week, in the middle of a workday, inside the thing I'm already building.

That's the part that hit me during the recording and hasn't left since. There's room for it in the day. Not instead of the day. In it.

It's going to take some work. New awareness, some self-training, probably some discipline, and definitely some creativity, because it doesn't happen by itself in a house where two people are heads-down. But it's the same fuel we already know runs well, and we've got a year of evidence that it does.

Happy is not the opposite of sad

Jana got at this better than I did.

The thing I'm describing isn't sadness. I'm not sad. If you asked me on a hard day I'd still tell you I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet, and I'd mean it.

It's flatness. Monotony. Getting up and doing the same things and feeling roughly nothing about any of it. Not depression, not grief, just a day that could have been any other day and probably was.

Aliveness is the word we keep landing on. You know it when you have it. Energy's up, you're a little giddy, things are funny that wouldn't be funny on a flat day.

You can have a good life and not be alive in it. Those are two separate questions and almost nobody asks the second one.

Doing mode	Being mode
Measures the day in progress.	Measures the day in how it felt.
Ten productive hours, nothing you'd tell anybody about.	Two hours you'll still remember in a year.
Laughter gets pushed to whenever there's time.	Laughter is on the list with everything else.
You look up in November and can't account for the fall.	You know exactly where the year went.

Label it in the morning

Here's the shift, and it's small enough that I almost didn't mention it.

Most people grade their mood at ten at night. How was today. Was I happy. And by then it's a report card on something already finished.

Do it at seven instead. Decide what you want to feel, before anything happens.

That's the first question in our practice, what do I want to experience, and I've been answering it about outcomes for years. Deals, projects, progress. Jana's been answering it about laughter the whole time, which is why she's been getting more of it than I have.

Name the feeling in the morning and you spend the day noticing chances to have it. Grade it at night and you just find out how you did.

Start with the body

Last thing, and it's the one that actually works when nothing else does.

You can't always think your way into feeling better. I've tried. When I'm stuck in my head, more head is not the fix.

Go the other direction. Action first, then feeling, then thought.

There's a thing called laughing yoga where people fake-laugh on purpose until it turns into real laughing, and it sounds ridiculous, and it works. Nobody's told a joke. The body starts doing the thing and the chemistry follows and then you're laughing for real and can't fully explain why.

Same with standing up, going outside, changing your posture, moving. The body will lead if you let it.

I'm not going to pretend I've solved this. I sat at that desk for ten hours this week and I'll do it again, probably Thursday.

But I've started writing laughter down in the morning, which is new. And I've started asking Jana what she means by it, which is newer, and is turning out to be a longer conversation than I expected.

The Living Lucky® Practice

Exercise: tomorrow at seven, before anything happens, write down what you want to feel. Not what you want to accomplish.

Reflection question: when did I last laugh, really laugh, and what was happening?

Journal prompt: what did I already know about my own aliveness that I've stopped doing?

Action: today, change your body before you try to change your mind. Stand up, go outside, move. Then see where your head goes.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I feel flat when my life is objectively good?

Usually because you're living in doing mode, where the day is a sequence of tasks and progress substitutes for feeling. It isn't sadness and it doesn't respond to a vacation, because the thing that's missing is presence rather than rest.

What's the difference between happy and alive?

Happy is a mood and it comes and goes. Aliveness is closer to vitality, a state where your energy is up and you're actually in your own day. You can have a good life and a flat one at the same time, which is confusing enough that most people conclude something is wrong with them.

Isn't this just burnout?

It overlaps and it isn't the same. Burnout usually comes with exhaustion and a loss of capacity. This is what you get with plenty of capacity and no joy in using it. If low mood persists no matter what your week looks like, that's worth taking to a doctor rather than solving with a journal.

Why label how I want to feel in the morning instead of checking at night?

Because a morning label is an instruction and an evening check is a grade. Name what you want to feel and you spend the day noticing chances to have it. Ask at ten at night and you just find out how it went.

Does forcing physical action actually change your mood?

In my experience, yes, and faster than thinking does. Posture, movement, and laughter all shift something in the body before the mind catches up. Laughing yoga is the extreme version, and the ordinary version is standing up and walking outside.

What is fun-responsibility balance?

It's a reframe of work-life balance. Instead of splitting hours between work and not-work, you make sure the responsibilities are counterbalanced by things that actually make you feel alive. It's about emotional allocation rather than time allocation, and it survives a week where the calendar goes sideways.

We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 31.

We Create Our Luck®.