too much joy is exactly enough

the strange suspicion of joy, and how to exceed it

First, a warm thank you and welcome to those that are new. My last essay some parts of you only emerge for certain people travelled further than I ever could have imagined. When I publish, sometimes the strangest and most wonderful thing happens: the ache that was once private returns to me in a new, more beautiful way refracted through others. To those who are new here, thank you for joining this unfolding conversation.

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My friend recently told me that whenever he feels happy, all he can think about is how it’s going to be taken away. The shadow of predicted loss eats into the actual moment, like a candle trembling under a draft. I recognise this in myself. I sometimes half-eat happiness, nibbling instead of biting, suspicious it might vanish if I savour it fully. But I want to learn to better sink my teeth into it. I want joy to feel like peaches and pomegranates: sticky, luscious, childlike, a reminder that bliss is our default state before we learned to distrust it.

It’s a strange fact that joy can sometimes feel scarier than pain. Pain, at least, is familiar, predictable, something the body knows how to brace for. Happiness can destabilise. It feels too bright, too exposed, so we ration it, as if too much sunlight might blind us.

Psychologists have a name for this: the upper limits problem. Each of us carries an invisible ceiling for how much joy we’re willing to let in. Cross it, and the alarms start to sound, so we pick fights, invent crises, fall suddenly ill, anything to tug life back down to the safer, lukewarm bath of “fine.”

Sherry Ning wrote recently about this exact phenomenon in her piece how lucky are you allowed to get:

When I ask my friends how things are going and they’re doing well, they get shy. Most people can tolerate only a moderate dose of happiness before they begin to self-regulate. They grow suspicious of their own good fortune like they’ve stumbled upon a vault left open by mistake. They act like joy is a smuggled gem.

I’ve noticed this in myself too, how hard it can be to hold joy without flinching. The sweetest moments arrive and instead of sinking into them, I catch myself looking sideways, as if they’re too bright to face directly. A sudden rush of happiness feels almost suspicious, undeserved, like if I linger too long it will burn me. I get shy about it, worried that if I’m seen enjoying it too fully, someone, or the world itself, might take it back.

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let the light in

I think often of Lana Del Rey’s two songs: Let the Light In and Say Yes to Heaven. They circle the same truth: the audacity it can take to let yourself be unbridledly happy. To believe, without flinching, that you are allowed to have good things.

It sounds simple, of course we want happiness, but receiving seems to be a different kind of work. Giving love is active, outward; receiving it asks for surrender. It means lowering the suspicion that what’s arriving is undeserved, resisting the reflex to bolt the door just as something beautiful comes knocking.

I’m struck by how many of us seem clumsy at this. If your dream life appeared, no catch, would you really step into it? Or would some part of you hesitate, scanning for the trapdoor? The old line says we accept the love we think we deserve (thank you Perks of Being a Wallflower). The same feels true of joy. The real question isn’t how much joy is permitted? but how much will you let yourself hold before you start reaching for the exit?

I suspect there is more joy available than we usually allow. Unlike sugar or alcohol, joy doesn’t spoil in excess. Too much is exactly enough. The ones who know this don’t just crack a window, they throw it wide, stand in the flood of light, and let themselves glow.

Recently I realised I had been living with only half the light I could have had. I mean this not metaphorically, but literally. My bedroom has two windows and I open the one within reach every morning, but neglected the other, which was slightly harder to reach. For months it stayed closed, and my room stayed dimmer than it needed to be.

Now, when I open both, the whole room glows differently, light bounding into every corner and filling the room with an airy brightness. The light streams through leaves, dancing golden across the carpet floor, my reminder that joy is plural, arriving from more angles than I expect.

It made me wonder: what other windows in my life am I forgetting to open? What joy is within reach, waiting only for me to notice the latch? Some opportunities for bliss don’t require effort. They just require remembering the second window even exists.

my favourite window in my house

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the ethical protest

Sometimes I wonder about the moral hesitation that shadows happiness: how much joy am I allowed while others are suffering? Isn’t it a kind of betrayal to be happy when the world is burning?

I’ve felt that guilt myself. Sitting in the afterglow of a day spent with someone I loved, only to scroll past images of wildfires devouring homes. Or walking through a park in spring, blossoms so blindingly pink they felt unreal, when suddenly I remembered a friend’s family member battling illness. In those moments sweetness soured into shame, as if joy were something stolen, as if by feeling it I had abandoned the suffering of others.

On social media the sensation sharpens. It can feel almost obscene to swipe from a brunch picture to a newborn’s smile, and then in the same breath to a warzone. Latte art, then charred buildings. A wedding dancefloor, then bodies pulled from rubble. The juxtapositions make it hard to know what to feel. How can all these worlds coexist? How is that allowed?

But of course, they always have. Children are born as others die. Lovers kiss under the same sky that bombs fall through. Spring arrives even when grief is thick in the air. The simultaneity is not new; only the delivery system is. What has changed is that we are now handed the whole spectrum in a single flick of the thumb. The world has never moved in a single register, and neither can our hearts.

This is why I hesitate to treat joy as suspicious, as though sorrow were the only honest proof of compassion. Misery doesn’t feed the hungry, and refusing joy will not bring the dead back. Grief matters, but it can’t, on its own, tilt the scales of justice. Joy is just as real a part of the fabric of existence, and to deny it distorts the picture as much as ignoring pain does.

Still, joy can lose its shape if it hardens into insulation. There’s always the danger of drifting so far into private sweetness that the rest of the world disappears. At its best though, I think joy can sharpen rather than numb. It reminds me what is worth protecting, what tenderness and beauty continue even in the middle of fracture.

I see this most clearly in writing. Essays often begin in heartache, something unsettled, but as I follow it, the ache cracks open into something that doesn’t erase the heaviness but makes it breathable. When I write abstractedly about my own heartbreaks, it feel raw, almost indulgent to share. But then come the replies. Sometimes strangers tell me my words had helped them love again. What began as a private wound became, somehow, a map for someone else’s renewal. That is the strange generosity of joy when it’s given form: it refuses to remain contained.

Joy doesn’t need to erase suffering. It can sit beside it, like a second sun in the same sky. One sears, one warms. Grief alone makes the world flat; joy alone makes it false. Held together, they let you see in full colour: broken and radiant, devastating and precious.

And joy is not zero-sum. Opening a window to more sunlight doesn’t darken your neighbour’s room; it spills brightness into the street. Joy multiplies. A laugh grows louder when it echoes. A song becomes harmony when it’s sung together.

Joy, in this light, feels less like escape and more like ballast. It can hold steady against despair, a reminder that life is still leaning forward. Choosing joy isn’t a betrayal of suffering, but a refusal to let suffering be the whole picture, a pulse that carries us toward beauty, intimacy, even justice.

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bite the peach

Joy moves like weather, sudden, undeserved, soaking everything it touches.

Most of us hesitate at the threshold, trying to decide if it’s safe to step into the light. But joy doesn’t linger for deliberation. It passes through, brief and dazzling, and what it leaves behind is not possession but trace: the shimmer of having been met.

It ripens, slips through the fingers, runs down the wrist. Its vanishing is not a failure but part of its shape, the reminder that what matters is that it was ever here at all. To taste it at all is already to be changed.

Perhaps joy was never meant to stay. Perhaps it exists to show us the texture of aliveness, to remind us of what it feels like to be porous to the world.

Like rain on skin, like fruit on the tongue, it disappears, and yet, for a moment, everything is illuminated.

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I’d love to hear, what’s a recent small joy you encountered? Mine is my window :)

Charles Bukowski

"My Uncle…taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dare I say, after a kiss. He told me that it was important at such times to say out loud, 'If this isn’t nice, what is?”

—Kurt Vonnegut