What does it mean that joy signals alignment with values?

Joy indicates that your current experience matches what you value.

Example: Mara works as a strategy consultant. The title sounds impressive at dinner parties. The salary funds a comfortable life. But she noticed something peculiar: the moments when she felt genuine joy — not relief that a deliverable was done, not the brief satisfaction of a compliment from a partner, but the full-body warmth of being exactly where she wanted to be — almost never occurred at work. They occurred on Saturday mornings at the community garden, where she spent four hours with dirt under her fingernails, teaching neighborhood kids how to grow tomatoes. The joy data was unambiguous. Volunteering activated her core values: tangible impact she could see, direct human connection, something growing because of her effort. Her consulting work had drifted from those values years ago — she produced polished decks that disappeared into corporate inboxes, solving abstract problems for people she never met. The strategy work was important-sounding. The garden was important-feeling. Joy was the compass that told the difference.

Try this: Track three moments of genuine joy today — not pleasure, not relief, not satisfaction at completing a task, but the specific warmth of feeling aligned with something that matters to you. For each moment, write down what you were doing, who you were with, and what value was being expressed or fulfilled. Then look at the pattern across all three. What do these moments have in common? What do they tell you about what you actually care about versus what you think you care about? If you cannot find three moments of joy in a single day, extend the tracking to a week — that absence is itself significant data about how much of your current life is aligned with your values.