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

If lasting joy is something you want more of, the first challenge is surprisingly basic: most of us don’t have a clear way to think about it.

We use a lot of emotional language—happy, stressed, burned out, fine—but we tend to collapse very different experiences into the same bucket. Without a clear map, it’s hard to tell what’s actually going on, let alone what might be worth changing.

What helped me was separating two things that usually get mixed together: how life feels overall and what emotions pass through me during the day.

To do that, I started using a simple model I call the Joy Scale.

The Joy Scale

The Joy Scale describes emotional climate—the background state that shapes how life feels over time.

I think of the scale moving left to right, like this:

Joy — Contentment — Indifference — Discontent — Sadness

At the far left is Joy: a deep sense of well-being and inner peace. Life feels grounded and coherent, even when circumstances aren’t ideal.

Next is Contentment. Life feels generally good and stable. Nothing is obviously wrong, but there isn’t much depth or vitality.

In the middle is Indifference. Life feels flat or muted. I’m functioning, but emotionally disengaged.

To the right of that is Discontent. Life feels persistently irritating or unsatisfying. Small things take on more weight than they should.

At the far right is Sadness, marked by hopelessness and deep emotional pain.

One important constraint makes this scale useful: I can’t feel joy and sadness at the same time. They sit at opposite ends of the same spectrum. Movement toward one necessarily means movement away from the other.

What This Made Clear to Me

When I first started evaluating my feelings this way, I could see my own patterns much more honestly.

For most of my adult life, my emotional climate floated between Contentment and Indifference, with occasional stretches of Joy, Discontent, and Sadness. That wasn’t a personal failure. It was normal.

And that’s an important point: the goal of life is not to feel joy all the time.

→ Discontent serves a purpose. It highlights what isn’t working.
→ Sadness can be a natural response to loss or real difficulty.
→ Even indifference can act as a kind of emotional rest.

These states exist for a reason.

What became clear, though, is that I simply wasn’t spending much time in Joy. I wasn't spending enough time with a deep sense of well-being and inner peace.

Not because something was wrong with my life, but because I didn’t understand how joy actually worked, or why it didn’t automatically follow from a life that was otherwise fine.

Once I could see that pattern, the problem changed. I wasn’t trying to eliminate discomfort or manufacture constant positivity. I was trying to understand why joy showed up, and what influenced how long I stayed there when it did.

Climate vs. Weather

This distinction helped things snap into focus.

Throughout any given day, I experience many emotions: frustration, anxiety, excitement, gratitude. These are moods—the emotional weather.

Weather changes quickly. Climate changes slowly.

I can feel anxious on a joyful day. I can feel brief happiness inside a discontented life. Confusing these two layers was one of the main reasons joy felt hard to reason about.

The Joy Scale gave me a way to separate passing moods from deeper orientation, so I wasn’t treating every emotional shift as if it defined my whole life.

Joy vs. Happiness, Wonder, and Awe

One reason joy is so easy to misunderstand is that we often associate it with certain experiences.

Laughter. Fun. Getting lost in the moment. A great conversation. A beautiful view. A moment of awe or wonder.

Those experiences can feel joyful, and they matter. But they’re better understood as events, not states.

Happiness, excitement, wonder, and awe are forms of emotional weather. They tend to arise in response to external circumstances, peak quickly, and fade on their own.

I’ve felt happiness inside a discontented season. I’ve experienced moments of wonder during periods that were otherwise heavy. Those moments didn’t change my overall climate.

Joy, as I’m using the word here, is different.

It’s less about what’s happening in the moment and more about how life feels as a whole. It’s a way of being rather than a reaction. It doesn’t require constant pleasure, and it doesn’t disappear the moment circumstances turn difficult.

That distinction helped me stop chasing the wrong thing.

I wasn’t lacking joyful moments. I was lacking a joyful state.

Why This Mattered

With a map, something different happened for me.

I could see where I tended to live on the scale. I could notice when I drifted. And I could ask a more precise question. Not “Why don’t I feel better?” but “Why am I rarely in the joy state, and what keeps me there when I am?”

That question turned out to have a real answer.

And getting to it started with understanding the scale.

In the next post, I explore what it really means to say that joy is a choice—and where that choice actually lives.