I have come to think of joy less as an emotional state and more as an orientation, a way of inhabiting the world. One can move through life in a stance of guarded suspicion, forever waiting for evidence that one is safe before daring to participate in the moment. Or one can move through life with a kind of porousness—an openness to being surprised, to being interrupted by beauty, to being drawn into something without immediately calculating its utility. To be one who seeks joy is to be the latter.
It is tempting to treat joy as something that either descends upon us or doesn’t, a gift from the atmosphere, subject to the whim of fortune. But in practice, joy is more often the result of a certain kind of attention—of choosing to notice what is already here, rather than waiting for something better to announce itself. This is why joy has always seemed to me more closely related to presence than to pleasure. Pleasure can be imported; presence must be inhabited.
The paradox is that joy often comes most reliably when we have stopped scanning for it directly. It is a byproduct of devotion—to a task, to a mission, to a conversation, to a friendship, to a morning spent in the company of one’s own thoughts without distraction. The people I know who seem to carry joy with them are rarely those forever in search of new amusements; they are the ones absorbed in the creation of things: writing essays, building companies, painting art, rehearsing a piece of music, drawing up an ambitious plan for no reason other than the delight of seeing it through. In such moments, the boundaries between seeking joy and creating it collapse entirely; the act of creation is joy.
This is perhaps why joy felt so abundant in childhood—not because childhood was without sorrow or difficulty, but because we had not yet been taught to conflate joy with consumption. The games we invented, the forts we built, the endless variations on a single afternoon with friends. They were not undertaken as a means to some other end. They were entire worlds in themselves. We did not measure them against what else we could be doing; they were enough. Somewhere along the road to adulthood, that instinctive sufficiency is eroded, replaced by an economy of comparison in which the value of an experience is determined by whether it matches an external ideal.
Modern life, with its dense apparatus for manufacturing desire, has perfected the art of offering us near-joys: the curated novelty, the pre-packaged adventure, the “experience” designed to be consumed and documented. They have the surface qualities of joy—the colour, the shape, the social affirmation—but they lack its depth, because depth cannot be purchased. This is not to say that purchased pleasures are false, but that they are structurally dependent on perceived utility. True joy is not. True joy is satisfied in the moment it arrives; it has no appetite for more because it has already filled the frame.
Being more attentive and intentional about this feeling is a form of liberation. It is a compass calibrated not to ambition or utility, but to the quiet magnetic pull of what makes one feel alive. I feel immense gratitude for those who fill my life with joy and a strong sense of duty to live a life that is oriented by that compass, so that the measure of my days is not what I achieved or acquired, but the depth of joy I was able to create and share. Choosing to live a joyful life — to both seek joy and to create it — is to choose the path lit from within.
This path is never walked alone. The compass points not only inward, but outward—toward the people, places and shared moments where the Self dissolves into something larger. In many ways, joy is an emergent property of a deep belonging: to a person, to a community, to the collective consciousness of being. Perhaps most important of all, to create joy with another is to love. You feel it in friendships, in the shared commitment to a process or a practice that you both tend to. You feel it in your work, where the architecture of technology becomes a shared vessel for curiosity, connection, and devotion. You feel it over dinner, when your joy recognizes its reflection in another, together creating an ephemeral and precious world out of nothing but presence. In that space, there is no past or future—only the unfolding of something alive, shaped by the hands and hearts of those within it. The root of the greatest companies ever built lies in a small group of people aligned in purpose, persistence, and shared joy.
Philosophers have long disagreed on whether joy is a natural default or a cultivated achievement. Spinoza thought of it as an expansion of being, a movement from lesser to greater perfection. Nietzsche found it in the radical embrace of life as it is, in all its strangeness and pain. Epicurus saw it in a life pared down to its essentials: friendship, simplicity, freedom from fear. Camus found it in defiance—in imagining Sisyphus happy at the foot of the hill. Different formulations, but each one recognises joy as something active, something in which the Self is fully engaged with the world rather than merely entertained by it.
If there is an anatomy to joy, it is not one that can be dissected in the laboratory; it is visible only in the lived body of a full life. It is there in the moments that draw us wholly into themselves, in the sudden enlargement of the ordinary, in the company of those who allow us to be porous to the world. It is there when we stop negotiating the present moment for something better and simply let it be enough. Joy requires no further reason. It is not a means to an end, but an end in itself—an all-consuming sense of belonging within a point in time. In its purest form, joy is forgetting—surrendering the calculus of utility in favor of savoring the beauty of presence.
And perhaps the real secret is that joy, once recognised, becomes easier to cultivate—not as an object to be hunted, but as a natural consequence of a certain way of moving through the day: attentive, generative, available. In this way, joy is not merely something that happens to us; it is a posture of the soul.