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It came to me in an online meeting.

I was sitting there, stressing about the volume of work ahead for our working group, feeling genuinely overwhelmed by everything that needed to be done. And then something shifted. I realised I was taking on more than I had to. I was part of the group — not solely responsible for it. My role was to show up, contribute my own gems of wisdom, and trust that together we would achieve our aims.

Two words came to mind: Ride and Enjoy.

And as I sat with them, I sensed something deeper than I’d recognised before. Yes, it’s about resting up and relaxing — letting go of the weight you don’t need to carry. But it’s more than that. Much more. These two words carry a whole philosophy. One I’ve broadly lived by — going along with things, getting on with life — but without ever really knowing how to let go and stress less.

Joy Is in the Doing, Not the Destination

The core idea is this: joy is not waiting for you at the end of the hard thing. It lives inside the process itself.

But first, let me say something about joy itself — because it is not the same as happiness. Happiness is surface. Joy is much deeper than that. It comes from the bowels of your being. It is possible to be in the depths of sadness, genuinely grieving or struggling, and still experience a profound joy rising from somewhere deep within you. The two can coexist. That is what makes joy so extraordinary — and so much more resilient than happiness ever could be.

When I completed Year 12 over two years instead of one, that extended timeline wasn’t a failure to be endured — it was a space in which I could find genuine satisfaction in the doing. Ancient philosophers called this eudaimonia — flourishing through engaged activity, not through comfort or ease. I didn’t know that word back then. But I was living it.

This is a quiet but radical refusal of the most common human bargain: I’ll be happy once this is over. Ride and Enjoy says: no. Find the joy now, inside the difficulty.

Holding the Paradox

The word “welfare” does two things at once. It refers to the social welfare system I’ve depended on throughout my life, and it refers to wellbeing — to flourishing. Most resilience philosophies try to resolve that tension, either by minimising the hardship or reframing it away entirely. Ride and Enjoy does neither. It insists that you can be genuinely dependent, genuinely constrained by systems and structures, and genuinely flourishing — and that these two truths do not cancel each other out. That’s philosophically honest in a way most inspirational frameworks simply aren’t.

Not Toxic Positivity

There’s an important distinction I want to draw here. Ride and Enjoy is not toxic positivity. Toxic positivity demands you deny the difficulty. This philosophy demands the opposite — you acknowledge it fully, and then you choose joy anyway.

I remember standing at a podium in Austria, delivering a keynote address to a European assistive technology conference, and hearing a voice inside my head: “Who are you kidding, Darryl?” I didn’t dismiss that voice. I didn’t pretend it wasn’t there. I told it to shut up and piss off — and then I got on with enjoying every moment of that presentation. The difficulty was real. The choice to enjoy it was equally real. Both things were true at the same time.

Being a Passenger Is Not Passivity

Here’s the insight that surprises people most. Western culture tells us that agency means control — that you are only the author of your life if you are the one driving it. I’ve spent a lot of my life as a passenger, literally and figuratively. And I want to challenge that idea directly.

I have a clear memory of being a child, back in the mid-70s when seat belts were optional, kneeling in the back of a friend’s family Holden FJ, watching the world through the rear window — seeing where I’d been rather than where I was going. I had no control over the direction of that car. But I was fully present. Choosing how I experienced that journey. That is agency. Being carried is not the same as being passive. It is its own legitimate way of participating fully in life.

You Don’t Have to Earn Your Place in the Journey

Beneath all of this runs something I feel deeply: you do not need to justify your right to joy. I’ve had people in my life — well-meaning people — who measured my worth by my economic productivity. The implicit message being that a disabled person on welfare needs to earn their place in society, needs to start “paying taxes like everyone else” before they deserve to be taken seriously. Ride and Enjoy is a direct refusal of that. The right to experience freedom, joy, and a full life is not contingent on what you produce. It is simply yours.

Knowing When to Drive

I should be honest about the tension I haven’t fully resolved. The same fierce determination that carried me through a PhD, international keynote addresses, and chairing a national organisation — that same drive can make it genuinely hard to let others support me without feeling guilty about it. I’m still learning when to push hard and when to simply be a passenger and enjoy the view. The philosophy holds both. It honours determination, and it gives you permission to rest. Neither is defeat.

The Invitation

Ride and Enjoy is not a cure for life’s difficulties. It is not a shortcut around them. It is a powerful mind shift — one that invites a deeper sense of being. It calls you to stop waiting for life to ease up before you truly start living it, and instead to find the joy that is already there, rising from deep within you, even in the hard seasons. The philosophy won’t remove the difficult things. But it will change what you do with them. And that, I’ve found, makes all the difference.

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This post was written with the assistance of AI. The ideas, experiences, critical analysis, and conclusions are entirely my own. AI served as the tool through which I articulated my thoughts more efficiently.