If we were sitting face-to-face, we could go through the following exercise: I would ask you what you want more than anything else. You would answer. I would ask you why you want that. You would answer. I would ask you why again. You would answer. If we continued this exercise for long enough (it usually only takes three or so rounds), we would arrive at what you really want, and it would almost surely be different than what you said you wanted at first. It wouldn’t be the sports car or pony or even the college degree for your child that you said you wanted at first—it would be joy. Joy is what you really want, and you only say you want everything else because you believe those other things will give you more joy than anything else.
The things people say they want when first asked are surrogate sources of joy. They are useful intermediaries that serve as waypoints on the path to greater joy, but they are not joy itself. While they are essential to guiding you closer to what you seek, their utility is limited, and you will never reach what you seek until you understand those limits.
Seeking joy through a surrogate goal can never lead you to levels of joy greater than what that surrogate goal can provide. In order to overcome this limitation, surrogate goals must be considered in conjunction with other known alternatives, as well as the understanding that something presently unknown will always lead to still greater joy than the best thing you presently know. Intermediate sources of joy will always reach a point where they fail to justify the existence of evermore suffering in life.