The Destruction of Joy, Meaning, and Value
Suffering destroys our ability to make meaning and value.
Posted June 3, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) describes a world sickness that can destroy joy, meaning, and value. I find this one of the best and most vivid ways to portray the different forms of acute and chronic suffering and anguish people experience. The richness of this concept, with vivid descriptions of its five phases, supplements the clinical language of some mental disorders including addiction . Overly clinical language may not be up to the task of capturing many people’s experiences of suffering. James’s world sickness gives voice to the ways suffering morphs and expands in a person’s life.
Out of sync with the external world
James divides the people who are most susceptible to world sickness into two types. The first type suffers from a maladjustment to the world. A person’s inner attitudes are out of alignment with the external world.
Phase one: Joy chilled. A person experiences joy chilled when he no longer feels happiness or joy in particular activities that had brought him pleasure previously. The shine is off. When something previously enjoyable no longer ignites a spark in a person, he may feel some confusion. A person may feel there is something wrong with them. They may wonder why they can’t snap out of it or pull themself up. They might try to explain it away by saying they’re just too tired, stressed , distracted, or pulled in too many directions. These may all be true and when they are less harried and stressed, the joy may return. This type of suffering is manageable or curable; with certain attitude adjustments, a person can right or balance themselves.
Phase two: Joy destroyed. If the stress, fatigue, and distraction continue, a person may slide further down the misery scale to the second phase: joy destroyed . Here the situation is becoming more dire because a person becomes less able and willing to recognize what James calls the “natural goods” of love, friendship , connection, and purpose. The sentiments that had accompanied these dry up and turn to dust.
Like the previous stage of joy chilled this phase is manageable. It takes greater effort, though, because the sentiments lack their usual motivational oomph. An individual might find themself doing the same things because they understand that they should. That should return to a want-to-do, which stokes the motivating sentiments and produces at least some pleasure from the “natural goods.”
Unfortunately, a person can move further down the misery scale and become the second type of person James identifies as vulnerable to the more devastating forms of world sickness.
The external world is rotten
The second type of person susceptible to world sickness believes the wrongness, bitterness, disappointment, or evil is part of him and the world. No amount of adjustment of attitude can manage this morbidity. One’s inner state may be just a reflection or response to the fact that the world and all its people are cold, miserable, and horrifying.
James describes this view of the world and our place in it as pathological melancholy , which itself has three stages, each of which is more horrifying than the previous.
Phase three: Anhedonia . Anhedonia means no pleasure or joy. A lack of joy, or more accurately, an inability to generate joy, characterizes this stage. It isn’t only pleasure that’s diminished or missing. Other cares and concerns are missing as well: activities, people, and places that had brought joy, or a sense of connection, meaning, and identity are met with a cold indifference. Put another way, a person starts not to care about some of the most important and central material, social, and spiritual dimensions of himself.
Phase four: Active angst. A person with active angst energetically cultivates or generates anguish. People in this stage navigate the world with irritation, resentment, exasperation, anxiety , and fear . People present these attitudes toward the world because it is how they experience the world.
The negative emotions in this stage can be directed at different objects. Some will direct them to the universe: Is there any value in living? What’s the meaning of life? Why do we humans even exist? These questions have a very wide scope; they’re less personal but generate huge angst because they seem unanswerable.
The other object toward which a person can direct all his negative emotions is his own self or person. This person will rail about all the bad and terrible things that have happened to him. He takes himself to be full of an inner pollution or to be the plague. Everything that happens is about him. He is the sort who, when tripping over a tree root, will believe the tree root tripped him. The person in this stage tends to believe that no one else could possibly ever suffer as acutely as he does.
Phase five: Panic fear. The final stage of pathological melancholy is the most extreme. In the grips of panic fear , a person fears everything in the universe. Fear is the only emotion the person has; it completely swamps their rational capacity such that they are reduced to a quivering mass of fear that is blood-freezing and heart-stopping. James knew this panic fear from the inside as a young man who had seriously contemplated suicide .
I find James’s description of world sickness helpful because it is neither solely psychological nor can it be reduced to something physical. It is simultaneously material, social, and what James called “spiritual,” though also what many would now identify as psychological. This concept of world sickness captures the warp and weft of forms of suffering—including addiction.
James, William (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans.
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Peg O'Connor, Ph.D. , is a Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.