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What children teach
Joy is a surprise, so it is hard to orchestrate. Nobody can surprise themselves, and trying is like tickling your own arm. A person can build a capacity for it, though, and children show how. They can't help staying in the moment, so nobody has to tell them to come back to the now. An eight-year-old who is always in it just wants to keep playing and doesn't want to leave anywhere.
Children also believe the world is full of treasures to find, which quiets the voices that say nothing will ever get better. And they will not optimize. Anyone who has watched a child try to put shoes away knows they can't.
Dropping the assignment
Adults carry metrics to measure themselves against and fail, down to a ring that tracks every day, until life is homework. Joy isn't part of that assignment, and the idea that it has to be found can be dropped entirely, because it will find a person who truly believes that living is a beautiful thing. Being alive, with eyes on the world, is already enough.
Why can't you tickle yourself?
In a 1998 study, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Daniel Wolpert, and Chris Frith found that people rated a tickle from a robot arm as less ticklish when they controlled it themselves. The cerebellum predicts the sensory result of the body's own movements and dampens the response to them. A touch the brain cannot predict, such as one from another person, is not dampened in the same way. The researchers showed the effect was lessened by adding a delay between the movement and the touch.
Why are surprises more rewarding than planned treats?
In experiments in the 1990s, Wolfram Schultz recorded dopamine neurons in monkeys receiving drops of juice. The neurons fired strongly when a reward arrived unexpectedly. Once a cue reliably predicted the reward, the firing moved to the cue and the reward itself produced little response. Schultz's work established the idea of reward prediction error, where dopamine signals the gap between what was expected and what happened.
Why do metrics change how people behave?
Economist Charles Goodhart made the observation in a 1975 paper on monetary policy. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later phrased it in the form now widely quoted: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Once people are rewarded for hitting a number, their behavior shifts toward the number and away from the thing it was meant to track. The principle is now known as Goodhart's law.