Christina Crook Describes 'Good Burdens'

Leader of the JOMO movement, podcast host, and author, Christina Crook, speaks with us about her newest book, Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age. She explains that the concept “good burdens” comes from an American philosopher of technology named Dr. Albert Borgmann. Borgmann, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Montana, coined the term in a book he published in the 80’s. Crook said, “The idea with good burdens is that there’s some…the big promise of technology, right, is that it’s going to free us from every burden, but he argues that there are some burdens like meaningful work, deep relationship, that we should not want to be rid of, and he called them good burdens. The basic idea with these particular activities, gardening, preparing a meal for loved ones and gathering them around the table, writing a book, that once you’re across a certain threshold of effort, the burden disappears and you could even say it becomes a joy. So that is the idea of good burdens.”

The conception of this book came during a time when Crook became aware of the way technology impacted not only herself, but also the world around her. “…I had a curiosity of about what would happen if I gave up the Internet for a stretch of time, which I did for 31 days. We’re actually in the season of Lent right now, so the season of kind of giving something up, and I did that sort of at the beginning of a year, January first, and that experiment lead into the writing of my first book, The Joy of Missing Out, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

In Good Burdens, Crook encourages her readers to find 100 joys in their life, regardless of how big or small. She also elaborates on the Harvard Grant Study, which she includes in her book and is the longest longitudinal study of human development in history. What they found from this extensive, 100-year study was simply that “happiness is love, full stop.'”