For several years, I carried a specific goal in my annual planning:

“I’m generally a happy person, but I want to feel more joy. More appreciation for what I have. More focus on today, less on the future.”

It wasn’t a throwaway line. It showed up for a few years.

What made it frustrating was that nothing in my life obviously pointed to why lasting joy felt out of reach. Each year brought many joyful events. My work was meaningful. My life was stable. I wasn’t unhappy.

And yet, the goal remained unmet.

At some point, I realized the problem wasn’t effort. It was definition.

I didn’t actually know what I meant by joy. I wanted more of it, but I couldn’t explain what it was, how it differed from contentment, or why it didn’t naturally follow from a life that was already working.

Many people I meet are in a similar place. Their lives function. They’re competent, responsible, and often successful. When asked how things are going, they say “good” or “fine” and then pause. There’s often a quiet sense that something is missing, even if they can’t name it.

It shows up in small, consistent ways:

• A sense of momentum without enjoyment
• A full calendar that doesn’t translate into fulfillment
• Gratitude mixed with a persistent flatness

These aren’t signs of despair. They’re signs of a life that works but doesn’t fully land.

What eventually helped me make traction on joy was not changing my circumstances, but understanding how joy actually operates. I learned to start distinguishing between different emotional states, to see joy as something more specific than “feeling good,” and to recognize how my own thinking shaped my experience of daily life.

Those insights changed the problem. And once the problem was clear, progress followed.

This series of posts is a distillation of what helped me move from wanting more joy to actually experiencing it more consistently. If you’ve ever set joy as a goal and found it strangely resistant to improvement, there’s a good chance the same distinctions will be useful to you.

In the next post, I introduce a simple way to map how life feels overall—and why understanding that map is the first step toward experiencing more joy.