Open your phone right now and scroll through the news. Within thirty seconds, you'll encounter something that makes your stomach drop. A conflict escalating. An environmental report with grim projections. Another headline about the cost of living. The NHS under strain. Political dysfunction. Something, somewhere, getting worse.
This is the backdrop against which we're all trying to live our lives. And increasingly, many of us have started to feel guilty about the moments when we're not worried. When we laugh too loudly at dinner. When we have a genuinely good weekend. When we catch ourselves feeling happy and immediately think: how can I be happy when the world is like this?
If that sounds familiar, this article is for you.
The Weight of Being Informed
We live in an unprecedented era of information access. Every crisis on the planet arrives in our pockets in real time, complete with footage, commentary, and an endless scroll of reactions. The Mental Health Foundation has flagged doomscrolling as a significant concern for mental health, noting that an overload of negative information can cause worry, irritability, difficulty concentrating, and guilt — often creating a negative cycle where people continue scrolling in an attempt to feel informed but end up feeling worse. We wrote about this tension in more detail in our piece on doom scrolling vs real connection.
The numbers reflect this. In the ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey for early 2026, a third of adults in Great Britain — 33% — reported high levels of anxiety, rising to 43% among 16 to 29 year olds. And it's not just abstract worry. Anxiety at this scale is stopping people from doing things — from going out, from making plans, from participating in the parts of life that might actually help them feel better.
News avoidance is rising too. The Reuters Institute's Digital News Report puts the UK at 50% of people sometimes or often actively avoiding the news in 2026, up four points in a year and well above the global average. We're caught in a strange bind: too informed to switch off, too overwhelmed to keep watching.
Against this backdrop, the idea of actively seeking joy can feel frivolous. Even irresponsible. As though happiness requires permission that the state of the world hasn't granted.
The Guilt Problem
There's a name for the feeling that you shouldn't be happy when others are suffering: empathic guilt. And while it comes from a decent impulse — caring about the world and the people in it — it can become deeply corrosive if left unchecked.
Empathic guilt tells you that your joy is somehow taken from others. That by laughing at dinner, you're being indifferent to suffering. That by enjoying your weekend, you're failing to take serious things seriously. It's the voice that whispers "how can you?" every time you catch yourself having a good time.
But here's the thing: your misery doesn't reduce anyone else's. Your anxiety about the state of the world doesn't improve the state of the world. And your exhaustion — emotional, physical, spiritual — doesn't help a single person in crisis. It just produces another person in crisis.
Joy is not a finite resource taken from a shared pool. Your happiness doesn't diminish anyone else's. If anything, the opposite is true. People who maintain their own wellbeing are more capable of showing up for others — more generous, more patient, more resilient, more present.
The New Economics Foundation's Five Ways to Wellbeing — developed from the UK government's Foresight Project on Mental Capital — places "Connect" and "Take Notice" as two of the five evidence-based actions for better wellbeing. Noticing moments of joy, rather than suppressing them, is a research-backed strategy for maintaining mental health.
Toxic Positivity vs. Genuine Joy — and How to Tell the Difference
Now, this is where it gets nuanced. Because there's a legitimate concern about forced happiness, and it has a name: toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity is the excessive pressure to maintain a positive outlook regardless of circumstances. It's the "good vibes only" culture that dismisses genuine pain. It's the colleague who responds to your struggles with "everything happens for a reason." It's the social media post that insists you should be grateful for what you have, implying that your suffering is a choice.
Psychologists describe toxic positivity as the suppression or invalidation of negative emotions in order to present a facade of happiness. It is not a clinical diagnosis, but it maps onto something that is well studied: habitually suppressing what you feel rather than expressing it is associated with more distress, not less.
So how do you tell the difference between toxic positivity and genuine joy?
Toxic positivity denies reality. It says "don't think about that" or "look on the bright side" when there is no bright side. It uses optimism as a weapon to silence legitimate distress.
Genuine joy acknowledges reality and exists alongside it. It says "the world is genuinely difficult right now, and I'm choosing to enjoy this meal with my friends tonight." It doesn't pretend the bad things aren't happening. It simply refuses to let them consume everything.
The distinction matters enormously. Toxic positivity is brittle — it cracks under pressure because it's built on denial. Genuine joy is resilient because it doesn't require the world to be perfect. It can coexist with grief, worry, and frustration. It doesn't demand that you feel good all the time. It just asks that you allow yourself to feel good sometimes.
What Actually Makes People Happy
The ONS has been measuring personal wellbeing across the UK since 2011, tracking four indicators: life satisfaction, feeling that life is worthwhile, happiness, and anxiety. Its latest data paints a complicated picture. The share of UK adults reporting good or very good health has fallen from 76.0% at the end of 2020 to 70.9% at the end of 2025, and the ONS itself cautions that apparent improvements measured against the pandemic years partly reflect an unusual baseline rather than genuine recovery.
But within the data, patterns emerge about what actually contributes to wellbeing. And the findings are remarkably consistent across studies.
Social connection comes out on top, repeatedly. The Mental Health Foundation, which built Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 around the theme of Community, puts it plainly: people who are more socially connected to family, friends or their community are happier, physically healthier and live longer, with fewer mental health problems, than people who are less well connected. Robin Dunbar's Oxford survey work shows that people who eat with others more frequently report higher life satisfaction and greater trust in others. And when the ONS asked people what matters most for wellbeing in their community, 50% named "feeling that you belong".
Money helps, but not in the way you'd think. The cost of living is the issue most people name as facing the country — 88% of adults in the ONS survey — and financial stress genuinely impacts wellbeing. But the research consistently shows that beyond a baseline of financial security, additional income delivers diminishing returns on happiness. What does keep delivering? Relationships. Purpose. Community.
Activity beats passivity. The things that make people happy are almost always things that involve engagement — doing, making, moving, talking, creating. Scrolling, watching, consuming — these are the activities we default to when we're exhausted, but they're consistently associated with lower wellbeing, not higher.
Around one in eight adults in Great Britain (12%) report low levels of happiness, with rates highest among those aged 16 to 29 (16%) and 30 to 49 (14%), according to the ONS. These are the same age groups most likely to report high anxiety and loneliness — suggesting that the things stealing our joy and the things that could restore it are closely connected.
Social Connection as a Source of Genuine Joy
If you had to pick one thing that the wellbeing research points to above all else, it would be this: other people.
Not in an abstract "humans are social creatures" way, but in a very specific, measurable way. The quality and frequency of your social connections predict your happiness more reliably than your income, your job satisfaction, your housing, or your physical health.
Dunbar's national survey on social eating found that the more often people eat with others, the happier they are, the more satisfied with life, the more trusting of those around them and the more friends they feel they can depend on. His proposed explanation is the endorphin system — the same mechanism that makes shared laughter and shared exertion feel good — though that survey did not measure endorphins directly. A good dinner with friends is not medicine exactly, but it is not nothing either — something we explore further in our piece on the role of food in emotional wellbeing and connection.
And there's something particular about joy experienced in company. Laughter shared with others is more intense than laughter alone. A beautiful sunset witnessed together is more memorable. A good meal eaten across a table from someone you like is fundamentally different from the same meal eaten alone.
Psychologists call this capitalization — the finding, from Shelly Gable's work, that sharing a good event with someone who responds warmly lifts your mood beyond what the event itself did. Good experiences become better when shared. And this works both ways — sharing your joy with others increases their joy too. Unlike empathic guilt, which operates on the false premise that happiness is zero-sum, shared joy is genuinely multiplicative.
Practical Ways to Create Space for Joy
Knowing that joy matters isn't the same as experiencing it. When you're stuck in a cycle of bad news, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion — when keeping friendships alive feels overwhelming — joy doesn't just show up on its own. You have to create conditions for it.
Put boundaries around your news consumption
This isn't about burying your head in the sand. It's about being intentional. Check the news once or twice a day at set times rather than allowing notifications to drip-feed anxiety throughout the day. The Mental Health Foundation specifically recommends setting boundaries around news consumption to protect your mental health. You can be informed without being immersed.
Schedule joy with the same seriousness you schedule obligations
We put meetings in the diary. Doctor's appointments. Car services. But we rarely schedule the things that actually make us happy. Put dinner with friends in the diary. Protect it the way you'd protect a work commitment. Because the research says it matters at least as much. If you need convincing, read about why saying yes more often could change your year.
Choose active joy over passive comfort
When you're depleted, the temptation is to collapse onto the sofa and scroll. And sometimes that's exactly what you need. But notice the difference between how you feel after an evening of scrolling versus an evening of genuine connection. Passive comfort numbs. Active joy restores. They feel similar in the moment of choosing, but the outcomes are miles apart.
Let yourself enjoy things without qualifying it
You don't need to preface enjoyment with "I know the world is terrible, but..." You don't need to perform awareness of suffering before you're allowed to laugh. You can hold both truths at once: the world contains real pain, and you had a lovely time tonight. These are not contradictions.
Connect regularly, not just occasionally
One good evening every few months won't shift the needle. What the research supports is regular, repeated social connection — weekly or fortnightly — that builds the kind of familiarity, trust, and belonging that sustains wellbeing over time. This is why structured social activities, regular dinner groups, and community involvement show up so consistently in the wellbeing literature. They create a rhythm of connection that you can rely on.
Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 focused on "Community" for good reason. The Mental Health Foundation's case for the theme is that communities give people a sense of belonging, safety and support, and that taking part in community activities boosts self-esteem, confidence and overall wellbeing.
Joy as Resistance
There's one more way to think about this, and it might be the most important.
In a world that constantly delivers reasons to be afraid, anxious, and hopeless, choosing joy is an act of quiet defiance. Not the performative, Instagram-filtered kind. The real kind. The kind that involves sitting across a table from someone, sharing a bottle of wine, laughing about something silly, and going home feeling lighter than you did when you arrived.
This isn't avoidance. It's sustenance. You cannot care about the world indefinitely without refuelling. You cannot show up for others if you're running on empty. And you cannot maintain hope — which is, ultimately, what motivates people to make the world better — if you never allow yourself to experience the goodness that already exists within it.
The bad news isn't going away. That much is certain. But neither is your capacity for connection, laughter, warmth, and belonging. These things exist in every shared meal, every honest conversation, every evening where you showed up even though you nearly didn't.
Joy doesn't require the world to be fixed first. It exists in the gaps. In the spaces between the headlines. In the warmth of a crowded table on a cold Tuesday evening. In the sound of people who were strangers an hour ago, laughing together like old friends.
You're allowed to enjoy it. In fact, your mental health depends on it.
Dinners With Friends exists to create exactly these moments — evenings of genuine connection, good food, and the kind of warmth that stays with you long after the last plate is cleared. No performance required. Just browse our upcoming events and let yourself enjoy it.