Art doesn’t have to come from pain. Joy is good material too, and it’s wildly underused.

Suffering gets treated like the entry fee for making anything real, which leaves people either mining their worst weeks or feeling disqualified for being all right. Attention is the real material, and you can pay attention to a good afternoon as closely as a bad one. Joy is harder to write well, which is probably why so little of it gets made. Difficulty and depth are not the same thing.

Make one thing this week about something you actually like. A person who makes you laugh, a street at a certain hour, a song you are not embarrassed about. Take it as seriously as you would take a sad one.