But is joy really being kept out of serious places... or are we just calling a lot of grim, stressful stuff "serious" that maybe doesn't need to be? Sometimes treating everything like a life-or-death meeting is the problem. Joy isn't less important because it feels good.
What if we just started calling out the fake serious stuff? At my last job, we had a rule: if a meeting could have been an email, you had to bring donuts. It made people cut the drama fast and actually talk like humans.