Some accounts you scroll past. Others stop you mid-doom-scroll and remind you that you are spinning on a space rock, getting to hear thunder and high-five someone for no reason! Jasmine Wilder, the writer behind the Tiny Joy Project, makes the second kind. In this episode, Emily sits down with the woman whose short reflections have reached millions of people across Threads and Instagram, and traces the heartbreak underneath the beauty. Spoiler: the woman writing about the magic of raspberries and moss got here through grief, health anxiety, and a series of mortality wake-up calls that refused to be ignored.

Jasmine opens up about the years that broke her open. A move from the States back to Finland. COVID. Financial freefall. Her husband’s young cousin diagnosed with cancer while pregnant, then losing that battle the same week Jasmine herself was rushed in for emergency surgery from sheer stress. A young woodcutter who walked across her yard one afternoon and was dead a week later. Each loss cracked her certainty that life was something you could plan around. Instead of looking away, she did the rarer thing: she read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, watched Neil deGrasse Tyson talk about the absurd miracle of existing at all, and let her own mortality become the doorway into gratitude. Tiny Joy Project is what she built on the other side of that reckoning.

Emily and Jasmine get tactical about the daily practice of staying alive to your life: no phone for the first hour, ruthless curation of what you consume, childlike curiosity as a discipline, and the radical act of choosing your reality every single morning. They talk about post-traumatic growth, why DEATH is the catalyst for noticing LIFE, the documentary Jasmine is already dreaming up, and the book she never thought she’d write. This conversation is medicine for anyone tired of the noise and quietly starving for permission to exhale.

Key Takeaways

● Mortality is not the enemy of JOY, it is the doorway to it. Jasmine’s anxiety about dying didn’t lift until she stopped running from death and started studying it.

● You are statistically more likely to never exist than to exist. Sitting with that math is one of the fastest routes to gratitude that actually lands in the body.

● Curate your inputs like your nervous system depends on it, because it does. Mute, unfollow, and stop consuming content that whiplashes you between kittens and corpses every three seconds.

● The news is real and the suffering is real, AND it is never the whole story. There is always a comma, never just a period.

● Childlike wonder is a practice, not a personality trait. Asking “who decided clouds should be a thing” is a legitimate spiritual exercise.

● Making the most of LIFE looks less like a bucket list and more like noticing. Be here. Pay attention. Stop drifting.

Guest

Jasmine is a writer and the creator of The Tiny Joy Project. She writes for people carrying big feelings. Small reminders that beauty still exists, even when everything feels a little broken. Her work has reached millions who needed a reason to exhale. When she’s not noticing sunsets or talking to her dog, she’s probably getting distracted by something small and thinking about it longer than she needs to.

Resources Mentioned

● Being Mortal by Atul Gawande: https://www.atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/

● Neil deGrasse Tyson on the odds of existing: https://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

● Tiny Joy Project on Threads: https://www.threads.net/@tinyjoyproject

● Tiny Joy Project on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tinyjoyproject/

Connect with Jasmine

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tinyjoyproject/

● Threads: https://www.threads.net/@tinyjoyproject

• A Jar of Fireflies: https://tally.so/r/Bz1bRe

Connect with Emily

• Join Emily’s mailing list: http://iamemilybingham.com/connect

● Book a Wake-Up Call: https://calendly.com/iamemilybingham/wake-up-call

● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamemilybingham/

● Join the YOLO Year Waitlist: https://iamemilybingham.com/yolo-waitlist

#DeathAndDisco #DeathMedicine #NoOneGetsOutAlive #EmilyBingham #LoveAndGrief #TinyJoyProject #JasmineWilder #PostTraumaticGrowth #ChildlikeWonder #MortalityMedicine