“Why Does Joy Feel So Fleeting?”
“I can have a good day. A real one. Something beautiful happens, or I laugh, or I feel a sense of relief—and for a moment, I think maybe I’ve turned a corner. But it never lasts. Within hours, sometimes minutes, I’m back to worry, flatness, or just the same emotional baseline. Why does joy disappear so fast?”
Dear Indira,
That question lingers. Not in a dramatic way, but in that quiet, familiar murmur I think so many people carry but rarely speak aloud: Why doesn’t joy last? Why does it vanish the second I notice it?
There’s a grief in that. A subtle, complex grief that comes not from the absence of joy, but from its inability to stay. From the way it flares up and then recedes, leaving you wondering if you imagined it, if you did something wrong, or if this is just what it means to be alive—brief sparks in an otherwise muted emotional landscape.
Let me start by saying: you’re not doing anything wrong.
What you’re describing is real. There’s a name for part of it: hedonic adaptation. It’s the psychological tendency for us to return to a baseline level of emotional experience, even after positive events. You get the promotion, or the good news, or the loving moment—and it lifts you, but only temporarily. Then the mind recalibrates. You level out. And often, that drop feels like failure, even though it’s just your system trying to find homeostasis.
But that’s only part of the story. Because hedonic adaptation is a cognitive explanation—and your question isn’t just about cognition. It’s about feeling. About the emotional experience of fleeting joy. The ache of knowing how good it could feel, and watching it slip through your fingers before you can settle into it.
There’s something profoundly vulnerable about joy. It demands presence. Receptivity. Openness. It requires that we let ourselves feel good, without immediately trying to control, question, or contain it. And for a lot of us, that’s terrifying. Because the higher we go, the further we might fall. The deeper the joy, the more devastating its loss might be. So our systems, trained by disappointment, learn to pre-empt the fall. To edge away from joy the moment we feel it arrive.
You might not even notice it happening. A quiet tension creeps in. A thought interrupts: This won’t last. Something bad’s coming. Don’t get used to this. And before you know it, the joy is gone—not because it was fragile, but because we were too scared to hold it.
This is especially common in people who’ve been through long periods of stress, trauma, or emotional instability. If your nervous system spent years in survival mode, joy can feel like a foreign country. Beautiful, yes—but disorienting. Untrustworthy. The body, trained to expect crisis, doesn't know what to do with peace. So it cuts the visit short. It brings you home to what's familiar—even if what’s familiar is flatness, vigilance, or low-grade sorrow.
Joy, in that sense, becomes not just a feeling—but a challenge to the status quo of your emotional life.
And here’s the hard truth: emotional sustainability isn’t something we inherit. It’s something we build. If no one modeled how to stay with joy—how to let it stretch out, how to trust it, how to return to it without guilt—it makes sense that joy feels like a visitor, not a resident.
So then, how do we learn to hold it longer? How do we build a nervous system that allows joy to stay?
It starts by noticing the moment you start to resist it. Noticing the thought patterns that interrupt the experience. Do I deserve this? Am I just waiting for the other shoe to drop? What if I lose it? And gently naming those thoughts without believing them.
It means learning to receive joy, instead of just chasing it. So much of modern life trains us to pursue happiness as an achievement—something to earn, measure, or perform. But real joy is often quiet. Undramatic. It lives in small moments: the texture of morning light, the right sentence at the right time, the first breath of cool air after being inside too long. And if your system is only attuned to fireworks, you’ll miss the warmth of candles.
It also means grieving the part of you that never got to feel joy freely. The child who was told to quiet down. The teenager who had to be on high alert. The adult who learned that good things always come with a price. That part of you deserves compassion. Not correction. You don’t need to force joy to stay—you need to show yourself that joy is safe to feel now. That you won’t punish yourself for having it. That you won’t immediately turn it into a task or a test.
And finally, sustaining joy isn’t just about holding the feeling longer. It’s about returning to it more easily. You don’t need to extend the high—you need to trust the rhythm. That even if joy leaves, it’s not gone. Even if it fades, it’s not a failure. You didn’t waste it. You didn’t ruin it. It simply passed through. And it will pass through again.
Because the point of joy isn’t to fix your life. It’s to remind you that your life isn’t only made of suffering.
Even now. Even here.
Still holding space for light to return.
–RJ