Recently, I wrote about the moments that take your breath away. The rare ones. The peaks. The experiences that announce themselves as significant.

It also made me think about what happens in between those peak moments. What carries us on ordinary days? The answer came during my sunset walk along the beach in Punta del Este, listening to a podcast by Visakan Veerasamy. He said that he has not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things, and that we are terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction feels sufficiently large. A wedding. A standing ovation. A life-changing exit. Anything less barely makes the ledger.

Small pleasures, by contrast, are treated like counterfeit currency. If something small “made your day,” we feel the need to downplay it. As if enjoying it too openly would reveal something embarrassing about the scale of our lives.

It seems there is an unspoken assumption that joy must be proportionate to significance. That the more impressive your life, the higher the bar must be for what counts as legitimate happiness. And so we roll our eyes, sometimes at others and sometimes at ourselves. Really? That did it for you? That was enough?

What if that logic is exactly backwards?

What if the true richness of a life is not how much you achieve, accumulate, or experience at scale, but how finely tuned your capacity is to extract joy from what is already there?

When you lower the threshold for joy, you do not just get more of it. You get it sooner. You get it now. In the language Eckhart Tolle uses, joy stops being postponed and becomes available in the present moment.

Who is really the more impressive person? The one who needs an entire production of achievement and validation before pleasure is permitted to appear? Or the one who can feel genuinely good after a good conversation, a well-timed song, or sunlight hitting a wall just right?

There is a kind of emotional robustness in the second posture. If the only things you allow to make you happy are rare, grand, and externally conferred, then your happiness is brittle. It becomes dependent on circumstances lining up perfectly. You have taken your joy hostage and handed life the ransom note.

What makes this even stranger is that we already operate with extremely low thresholds, just in the opposite direction. Being put on hold. A password that fails on the first attempt. A door that doesn’t open the way you expect. Small frictions, big reactions.

Our threshold for frustration is comically low. Our threshold for joy is absurdly high.

A moment of being understood passes without comment. Something working the way it should is quickly forgotten. A small kindness slips by unmarked. If we can feel derailed by friction, why can’t we feel grateful for ease?

As I kept walking, a different question surfaced: how little of a thing would need to happen to make your day?

Not your year. Not your life. Your day.

How much delight could you squeeze out of a quiet house in the early morning, a cup of coffee that tastes exactly right, or the relief of finishing something small you had been putting off? These moments might seem insignificant, but dismissing them because they are small is like refusing a steppingstone because it is not the destination.

Life is not constructed out of landmark events. It is constructed out of moments so small they would never register on a calendar.

So why can’t something small be something great?

Maybe it is our reflex to downplay. A kind of internal correction that says, don’t make too much of this. The first sip of coffee. A message arriving at just the right moment. Enjoying them fully feels oddly disproportionate, as if meaning must be rationed.

But if you hold your happiness hostage until something extraordinary happens, you have the entire mechanism of happiness upside down.

Even the most extravagant life is still lived between moments. Between the flights, the dinners, the applause. No matter how impressive the itinerary, there are gaps. And in those gaps, the same small opportunities for joy exist.

I chose 2026 as the year to live in a permanent state of gratitude. Since thinking about this more deliberately, it has shifted something in me. I notice more. I accept more. I resist the reflex to diminish moments that break through my defenses simply because they are small.

So maybe the invitation is simple. Do not raise your threshold for joy. Do not shame yourself when something minor makes you smile. Ask instead what would happen if you became easier to delight.

What if something small could be something great?