Finding Joy in the Middle of a Life That Feels Flat
What’s going on with joy in midlife? How to approach a sense of flatness by noticing tiny sparks of meaning in everyday life — even when everything feels muted.
There’s a particular kind of quiet ache that often shows up in midlife.
It doesn’t arrive like grief or crisis. It doesn’t make a scene.
It’s just… flatness. A greyness. A sense that life has become slightly muted at the edges.
You still do the things. You get up, make the coffee, keep things moving.
You’re not falling apart. But you’re not quite in it, either.
It’s like the colour has drained a little from your days — and you’re not even sure when it happened.
I’ve been in that place, too. I still dip in and out of it, if I’m honest.
And for a long time, I thought something must be wrong with me. That I wasn’t trying hard enough. That I’d lost my spark and needed to find some big solution to get it back.
But eventually I realised: maybe this wasn’t a crisis.
Maybe I didn’t need to fix it.
Maybe I just needed to notice it.
That’s when I started paying attention — not to what was missing, but to what was still quietly present.
Not to fireworks. But flickers.
A particular slant of light in the kitchen.
The sound of a friend in a voice note.
A good sentence in a book.
The way my child’s curls are ever unruly.
The scent of the first-morning coffee.
Tiny joys. Real ones. Ones that belonged to my life, not to someone else’s morning routine or Instagram reel or version of “feeling better.”
And slowly, something shifted.
Not dramatically. Not overnight. But gently.
Life started to feel a little more textured again. A little more mine.
What I’ve learned — and keep re-learning — is this:
> Joy doesn’t always arrive as fireworks. Sometimes it’s a flicker. A soft landing. A quiet something emerging beneath the surface.
And when we’re tired, it’s easy to miss it.
Because joy rarely shouts. It whispers. And if we’re rushing, striving, over-efforting — we won’t hear it.
And those reminders?
They’re everywhere — if you begin looking for them gently, without pressure.
So maybe the question isn’t just: Where did my joy go?
Maybe it’s: Where might I find it hiding in the edges of the life I already have?
Try noticing one small thing today that brings the faintest flicker of something — a pause, a softness, a breath, a second of connection. That’s enough. That’s the beginning.
Maybe you don’t need to feel the biggest of feelings right now. You just need to feel a little more here.
Our Emotions Coaching for Midlife Sessions
Curious about how to revive joy in your life, bring the spark back, and reconnect with what makes you happy (even excited again), check out our emotions coaching sessions.
These sessions can be as much about nurturing perceived positive emotions such as joy, love, and happiness, as managing perceived negative ones like grief, sadness, and anger.
Want to try it? Learn more about our starter sessions here.
Feeling all (or maybe even none) of the things as you navigate midlife. Sign up for our newsletter to learn more about how to feel better as you move through these years.
The Museum of Ice Cream
The Museum of Ice Cream might seem like it’s about sugary confections, and equally as sweet images, but approach it as a place of connection and then it becomes something else entirely different.
Ok, you probably have your assumptions about the Museum of Ice Cream that has been popping up in locations in San Francisco (now permanent), New York (very new and permanent), Miami, and Los Angeles. We had ours. We imagined it as an Instagram mecca, a hyperreal pink (that’s Pantone 1905C) paradise of shine and shimmer. Froth and frolics. And it was that: when we visited the SF version, we took photos with everyone else against backdrops of floating cherries and giant popsicles, made impermanent messages with pink magnets, crawled into mirrored rooms and climbed pink walls, and swam deep in the famous pit of colors. We hadn’t gone as far as some; we hadn’t coordinated our outfits and we hadn’t posed again and again for the perfect shot. But we had image-laden fun: we consumed a ton of sugar, visual and edible. We laughed and interacted and just spent a silly afternoon with our kids actually sharing in their joy and not watching from the sidelines as is sometimes the condition of modern parenting.
Though we did all this and came away feeling great (maybe slightly sick also), we have since realized we kind of missed the point. And maybe we weren’t, or aren’t, the only ones. See the Museum of Ice Cream is not really about ice cream (though there’s now a Target branded line that includes such things as Impeach-Mint so this argument might get a bit blurry). It’s also not about taking out your phone to capture the perfect image. It’s also not about screeching through oblivious of those around you as you try to craft the perfect time. What we have since learned is that that it is fundamentally about connection. That’s right, this experience, this museum, now handily rebranded by its founders as an ‘experium’, has been engineered to bring people together, to be a kind of social glue, albeit of the creamy vanilla kind.
It was this episode of Yale associated podcast The Happiness Lab by Dr. Laurie Santos that started to shift our perspective, and as we dug deeper into the motivation of co-founders Maryellis Bunn and Manish Voramotivation, we found more and more that spoke to The Museum of Ice Cream as a counterpoint to our current epidemic of disconnection and the loss of spaces in our worlds that give us the opportunities to just be people together.
Here’s the irony: The Museum of Ice Cream was intended to be so spectacular that we wouldn’t be driven into the world of image-making on our phones, but rather we would be driven away from them. We’d want to immerse ourselves more in this fantasy world, for a short time tangibly all around us, because it was more real, more compelling, than those pixels. We would want to share that experience with those following a similar journey through the joyful labyrinthine spaces, as that would heighten our own experience for us. We’d want to escape our isolation and run into a place of collective joy.
The Museum of Ice Cream has since pivoted and like all new concepts iterated on its theme. Yes, it’s a huge phenomenon that you may have visited, probably most likely have an opinion on, or are in the process of imitating (see the idiosyncratic experiential museums that it has since spawned), but it’s also still figuring itself out. Like Solo Nights (where you get in free if you turn up alone) and the phone free sessions; the Museum of Ice Cream concept is truly working when people connect within this fantasy palace, when they notice what’s actually around them and each other, and when the conversations started within the shininess go outside its walls, and sometimes that needs a phone-free helping hand.
The Museum of Ice Cream is a pop-up experience that’s meant to last more than the sugar high even as it gives you that high. It’s a careful line to tread, but we’re betting that as long as it's as much about the people it buoys up as the abundance of ice cream (or whatever the framework may become) that is consumed then this will stay a place of comfort that continues to soothe our disconnected lives.
When something shifts in your relationships, it can feel confusing and lonely. This piece explores how to stay connected while being yourself, even when it’s messy.