This post is Part Three of a six-part series. Get started with Part One.

When I first encountered the idea that joy is a choice, I didn’t like it.

It sounded simplistic. Even dismissive. As if difficult circumstances could be overridden by attitude alone. That didn’t match my experience, and it didn’t explain why lasting joy had remained elusive for me even when life was going well.

What eventually changed my mind wasn’t a slogan. It was a clearer definition of what was actually being chosen.

The distinction that mattered was this: events create pain; interpretation creates suffering.

Pain is unavoidable. Things go wrong. People disappoint us. Bodies break down. Plans fall apart. That’s part of being human.

Suffering, on the other hand, is what happens when pain is combined with the stories we tell ourselves about it. What it means, how long it will last, and what it says about us or our future.

That’s where choice enters the picture.

Choosing Climate, Not Weather

Using the Joy Scale, I could see that I didn’t choose most of the emotional weather in my life. Moods came and went based on stress, fatigue, conflict, or good news. Trying to control that was pointless.

What I did have influence over was something slower and more stable: my emotional climate.

Joy or sadness, in this sense, isn’t a reaction to events. It’s a stance. It’s the posture I take toward life as events unfold.

I didn’t choose whether something painful happened. I did choose how much time I spent replaying it, amplifying it, or projecting it into the future. I chose which thoughts I treated as facts and which I treated as noise.

That distinction was central to my own progress. A major influence here was the book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which reinforced something I was beginning to see firsthand: not every thought deserves my agreement.

Why This Matters

Once I understood joy as a choice of climate, not a denial of pain, the idea stopped feeling naive.

Choosing joy didn’t mean pretending things were fine. It meant refusing to let every negative event drag my emotional climate all the way toward sadness. It meant noticing when I was feeding interpretations that kept me stuck on the sadness side of the scale, and learning to interrupt that process.

This also clarified why joy and sadness can’t coexist. They’re not competing emotions. They’re opposing orientations. Moving toward one necessarily means loosening the grip of the other.

And this is where choice actually lives: not in forcing positive thoughts, but in deciding which interpretations get reinforced and which ones don’t.

What Changed for Me

Once I saw joy this way, the goal stopped feeling abstract.

I wasn’t trying to feel joyful all the time. I was trying to spend less time reinforcing sadness, discontent, and indifference, and more time cultivating a climate that made joy possible.

That shift didn’t remove difficulty from my life. It changed how difficulty landed.

Understanding joy as a choice didn’t give me control over everything. It gave me responsibility for something very specific: the direction my emotional climate drifted over time.

And that turned out to be enough.

In the next post, I explain how small responses compound over time, creating either a downward spiral or momentum toward joy.