I always believed that the life I once had was the best. This feeling, I think, is universal. Yet every time I tried to examine my own joy, I regretted it. Joy—or any emotion, really—cannot survive under analysis. The moment you begin to explain it, you start to measure it. You ask whether you are the happiest person among your friends, your community, or the entire world. But comparison never ends. It circles back endlessly, asking for more evidence, more validation, until joy itself fades into abstraction.
You compare, and then you find reasons to deny. But that is wrong—not because comparison is evil, but because it misunderstands the nature of feeling. Joy is not a ranking, nor a victory; it is an experience that dissolves the need for measurement. The moment you stop defending it, joy simply is.
Perhaps wisdom lies not in examining happiness, but in allowing it to exist—unmeasured, undefended, and free.