There is something weird in the air. More and more of my advertising parties are people nodding in agreement, genuinely feeling that everything great in advertising is either gone or about to leave. Well, I feel otherwise. Almost violently.

Hear me out. I don't think it's lost. I feel we have just stopped looking for it. Our psychology naturally hates change because it triggers the fear of the unknown. And right now, there is too much unknown running around for us to keep looking for what we refer to as 'love'.

The situation is truly overwhelming. Ever-evolving digital, ever-confusing Gen-Z, mind-bending network consolidations, mind-numbing client feedback. The list is endless and makes my head spin. I wish it was all more marshmallows, joy, fun and everything else. Because those three represent the 'love' in advertising for me.

Let's start with joy. It's my favourite one. Joy was the first thing I discovered in advertising, right after I discovered dejection, but we can ignore that. I still feel butterflies before a presentation. I feel giddy right before a talk. I feel fear while telling an art-director that the typography is loose. Every Monday, I feel nervous putting up a LinkedIn post. But it's not about these moments. It's about the moment when it all comes together. It makes my heart run like a roller coaster. The joy is a rush. We are blessed that we can experience it without jumping out of a plane or tickling an alligator. We are adrenaline junkies. All of us. With a tinge of lazy and crazy. Cheap thrills without life risk is what we live for, but we stopped chasing this joy somewhere. The culprit is the job list. Presentations come and go. Wins and losses happen silently. Joy gets crushed under a hundred-ton job list. Everyone at independent agencies is too busy surviving. Everyone at networks is too busy consolidating. If we just left some time for it, I feel it will be found. Like Santa Claus would say, "There is always time for joy."

Next comes fun. When I joined advertising, the floor was as alive as a college canteen. Music. Jokes. Noise. Weird laughs. We definitely needed a cleanup of our act but over time even the good stuff disappeared. Fun has no space in procedure and therein lies the resistance. The culprit, I feel, is its strongest general: the timesheet. There is no time on it for 'fun'. After all, fun doesn't do anything directly. It can't be attributed to the client. It doesn't reduce attrition. But indirectly it affects all of these and so much more. By removing fun from the work, we're just making the problems worse. Happy employees are better employees. This can easily coexist with the timesheet. The day we decide to look for it, it'll be back like the Terminator.

The 'everything else' in advertising was a big part of the happiness. Random meetings. Unplanned celebrations. Shared frustrations. Bad clients with good briefs. Good clients with bad briefs. Shoots. Celebrities. Pitches. Dal khichadi vs biryani. Beer vs whisky. Agency politics. Appraisals. I'm a boy from Kanpur who'd never in his wildest dreams have thought of talking to Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan or Deepika Padukone. We are one of the few professions where something scribbled on a tissue becomes the campaign plastered all over the city. 'Everything else' is still there. We have just stopped paying attention to it. The day we do, it'll hold meaning again.

I love my job and I'm happier being an optimistic fool. Advertising is love for me and I feel blessed to be here. Don't let the pessimists dampen the magic. Believe in it and it will change you.

The author is CCO and co-founder, tgthr India. This column first appeared in our March issue. Click here to get your copy!