The Year Joy Broke Through

In these surreal times there’s quite a lot of “welp, that wasn’t on my 2026 bingo card” going around. Humanoid robots chasing wild boar in Poland. PinkPantheress barking. Justin Bieber getting $10 million for YouTube karaoke at Coachella. Amanda Seyfried’s prosthetic butthole.

It all feels a bit off-kilter, like the timeline’s slipping slightly out of alignment. But then again maybe these oddities are just par for the course as our systems bend and twist under historical pressure. However, there really is one thing that nobody predicted for 2026: a collective outpouring of unabated, unabashed, almost disorientingly unironic joy.

Perhaps, in retrospect, the signs were already there at the end of last year – at least in the election of Zohran Mamdani, and what people around the world thought they saw in it. Before the ideology, before the polished rhetoric, before the doorknocking and flesh-pressing, there was that Cheshire Cat grin. Plenty of politicians can switch it on for the cameras, sure, but this felt like something else – something looser, less rehearsed. And into this year, even 100 days on, he still makes it look like shovelling snow, or filling potholes, or chatting to grannies on the street fills him with total delight.

And, it turned out, this was what people wanted – or maybe what they’d forgotten they wanted. The US Winter Olympics figure skaters, and above all Alyssa Liu – returning to the sport because she actually felt like it, looking how she chose to, skating up to the world’s cameras practically fizzing as if to say “that’s what I’m talking about!” – radiated joy not just in winning or achievement but in movement itself, in freedom. The Bad Bunny half-time show leaned even harder into it: joy as defiance, as something lived – dance, romance, food, home, migrant stories – all reframed as sites of power and pleasure, not just survival.

Then came Artemis II. The whole thing had this slightly unreal glow: diverse, friendship-bracelet-wearing astronauts on a mission named for Apollo’s twin sister; women (plus a Sailor Moon doll) filling the control room and NASA’s coverage fronted by women, too. It elicited thrilled reactions that spaceflight hasn’t managed in years, despite all the efforts of rocket-measuring oligarch egos and anti-DEI wannabe bullies. Even the tears cried as they announced a crater for crew member Reid Wiseman’s late wife – “It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call it Carroll” – were tears of joy, love and comradeship.

Now, the youth of Budapest are raving in the streets for democracy, internationalism and the fall of a would-be tyrant. A new government minister gamely dances with them and, naturally, going viral. The caption of one video translates, in part, as: “Change is a celebration of joy: today we did not wake up to another country, but to that which is ours, ours, all of us.”

It carries the same flickering energy as No Kings – still worth repeating: the largest single peaceful mobilisation in US history – and London’s House Against Hate party, but turbocharged. A restatement of dancing, partying, occupying public space as a kind of absolute freedom unsullied by cynicism or by the need to live up to the weight or significance of past movements.

Joy, by definition, exists in the moment. It arrives suddenly, doesn’t really explain itself, doesn’t care how it looks or how long it’ll last. SEED Club member Noelle Weaver points to writer and academic Kate Bowler, who describes happiness as “cumulative, fragile, and easily undone,” “about comfort,” while “joy, by contrast, can exist alongside pain, grief, and uncertainty. It doesn’t erase what’s broken – it helps hold it together.”

It’s enabled, briefly, by community, activity and presence – less by abstraction and ideology. But it can’t be planned, or faked, or bottled or held onto for too long without it slipping away. As William Blake wrote, over 200 years ago:

“He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.”

It can appear anywhere, which is maybe the strangest part. In pop culture, in the way the accomplished foolishness of polka-dot avant-rockers Angine de Poitrine has somehow captured imaginations to an almost absurd degree. In the glorious showbiz alchemy of Sabrina Carpenter meeting Miss Piggy. And, yes, in PinkPantheress’s constant, effortless surrealism and fun on the biggest stages. (All of them the antithesis to Bieber’s can’t-be-arsed nihilism?) You can even see it in Pope Leo (Bob from Chicago)’s cheerful, gentle “I have no fear” defiance, speaking truth to power with a kind of quiet lightness.

Maybe it’s not that shocking that this wave is breaking now. Maybe, as things get darker and more fearful, embracing explosive, radiant joy is less a reaction and more a necessity. Maybe it’s the only way any of this makes sense.