Filling Digital Space with Joy for Mental Wellbeing

Getting digital toxicity in check is only the first step of nurturing digital wellbeing. The second step is being intentional about what we are filling that time with. During Mental Health Awareness Month, we’re calling on JOY to fill that space. Mental health and screen addiction can feel like huge and heavy challenges, but we always come back to one important truth. Joy matters. A psychologist who founded positive psychology, Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, identified three distinct approaches to joy for teens: to pursue a pleasant life, a good life, and a meaningful life. A pleasant life is having fun by engaging in hobbies or spending time with friends. A good life is finding “flow” while being completely absorbed into a creative act or an activity like sports. A meaningful life is finding purpose through volunteering or giving back. While the digital world isn't completely void of these pathways, social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt suggest online spaces often fail because they replace embodied, face-to-face interaction with "disembodied" digital experiences. We can create fully embodied and lasting joy pathways when we build belonging offline. Our Remixers continuously cultivate these three distinctive pathways to happiness by: 1. Finding Pleasant: Kayaking during our Summer Innovation Lab or integrating games in our workshops 2. Finding Good: Building a sense of community, forming lasting memories while working on projects or presenting  3. Finding Meaningful: Being part of a youth-led movement and giving back through teen-led workshops so kids and families leave feeling lighter and better than when they walked in Joy is one of our key allies in taking on the unique challenges of the digital age. Our commitment to joy has taken on a team motto to “lock in and have fun,” coined by our team of youth leaders during our 2025 summer innovation lab. This motto captures the essence of how we want to approach this work. To emphasize our commitment to solving this big challenge of how the digital world can impact mental health and our commitment to doing so by maximizing the JOY that comes from real-life connections, friendships, and a shared sense of purpose.    Remixers in the wild having fun, coming soon… 👀