Rainn Wilson knows exactly what most people want from him. For millions, joy looks like pressing play on another rerun of The Office, letting Dwight Schrute’s chaos and deadpan zeal wash over them like comfort food. It’s a legacy he appreciates, but it isn’t where he wants to leave people. Lately he’s become deeply invested in a different kind of joy, something sturdier than nostalgia.
His new book, SoulBoom: How to Start a Spiritual Revolution, lays out the case. Wilson argues that one of the few paths out of the cultural exhaustion everyone feels is recovering a sense of spiritual grounding. Not in a self-help way and not in a vague “try meditation” sense, but in a way that reshapes how we see ourselves and the world around us.
“If we’re cynical and pessimistic, then nothing gets done,” he says. “And the forces of chaos and confusion, of materialism and of hopelessness and despair, they win. If we stay pessimistic and cynical, they win.”
Wilson doesn’t say that from a distance. He admits he’s just as prone as anyone to fall into doomscrolling and despair.
“It’s really easy to get pessimistic and cynical,” he says. “Just read the newspaper. This sucks. We’ll never get out of this. Nothing will ever change.”
That honesty is why joy, for him, has become an intentional discipline. He doesn’t treat joy as something you feel first and choose second. He treats it as a decision — an action that shapes emotion, not the other way around. And that’s where one of his clearest guiding principles shows up.
“Don’t give up hope, remain joyful, spread joy, spread positivity and work for change,” he says.
It’s the closest thing Wilson has to a mantra, and it captures the spirit behind everything he’s trying to teach.
One of the ways he practices that is surprisingly simple: give joy away.
“Not only am I going to attempt to feel joy and connect with joy, but I’m going to spread joy,” he says. “I’m going to give joy to someone else as a service.” He even jokes that joy comes with a built-in return. “Believe it or not, when you give joy to someone else, you actually feel you get like a 10 percent dividend on the joy that you give.”
But choosing joy also means refusing the familiar inner script insisting everything is pointless. Wilson calls that voice out directly — the one that mutters that humans are awful and the world is doomed.
“When that voice comes up — the one that says, nothing will ever change, this sucks, humans are just buttholes — we’ve got to squash that impulse and recognize it for what it is.”
He doesn’t pretend it’s easy. He just refuses to let that be the voice in charge.
“Feel it, recognize it for what it is,” he says. “Then let that go and focus on joy.”
Wilson doesn’t dismiss the heaviness many people feel. In fact, he names it plainly. Mental health struggles are rising. Climate anxiety is widespread. Politics feel toxic. Social media pushes people toward image and materialism. He’s sympathetic to anyone who feels overwhelmed by it all.
“It’s a good time to get depressed,” he says with a strange mix of honesty and humor.
But he also believes those emotions are trying to send a message. Young adults often think they shouldn’t feel anxious or pessimistic at all. Wilson disagrees. “Those negative emotions can be very valuable teachers,” he says.
In SoulBoom, he describes a way of looking at the world that has shaped his own perspective: the idea that two forces are operating at once — integration and disintegration. Disintegration is the part most people see first: systems breaking down, communities unraveling, people drifting further apart.
“It’s really easy to get stuck looking at the forces of disintegration,” he says.
But integration is happening too. Smaller, quieter, but real.
“There’s plenty of content on social media, there’s websites, there’s grassroots organizations,” he says. “There’s people working to make a better world, to help nature, to raise awareness, to connect.”
His advice is deceptively simple: shift your focus.
“Start to let the disintegration go,” he says. “Focus on the integration.”
Wilson isn’t claiming to have solved joy. He isn’t handing out a formula. What makes him compelling is how ordinary his approach is. He’s navigating the same world everyone else is, noticing the same problems, wrestling with the same pessimism.
He’s just choosing — actively, repeatedly — not to let despair set the tone. Joy, for him, isn’t a mood. It’s an act of refusal. And in a moment when everything encourages numbness or cynicism, that choice feels less like self-help and more like rebellion.
