Slang & Culture
p(joy)
A deliberate parody of p(doom): your own estimate of whether satisfying moments are increasing in your life, used to work out what reliably creates them and how to be in those conditions more often. The point is not accuracy — it is that the same made-up-number move people use to quantify catastrophe can be pointed at something you can act on, particularly at work. Nobody audits it, so the figure only matters as a direction of travel.
Origin
Coined by journalist Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, in her newsletter Manoush Minutes on 23 September 2026, explicitly as a constructive answer to p(doom) — in the same piece she puts her own score at about 28% and sets a target of 40%.