Not joyless, only unwilling to go first
It is not that you cannot enjoy things. It is that enjoyment is scheduled after the work, and the work is never finished. Pluto in Capricorn in the 5th house puts weight and obligation into the part of the chart meant for play, so pleasure here has to be justified before it is permitted.
The Capricorn half of this is collective. Pluto marks a long span of birth years with the same seriousness about duty, and that says nothing about you in particular. The 5th house is the personal half, fixed by your birth time. It means the seriousness lands on romance, creativity and play, which is why other people's ease with enjoyment has always looked slightly foreign to you.
Whether you have earned the right to it
On whether you have the right to it. Every genuine pleasure arrives with a quiet audit attached: whether you did enough today, whether this is indulgent, whether somebody looking in would think less of you. The audit runs during the pleasure rather than before it, which is precisely why the pleasure does not do its job and why you finish leisure less rested than you began it.
The test is an afternoon that produces nothing
The situation recurs and you dislike it every time: unstructured hours with nothing to show at the end. You will fill them with a task within twenty minutes. Sit through one of them a month without converting it into work, because the discomfort is the whole exercise and it does diminish with repetition.
How the reserve reads in romance
You court seriously, follow through, and mean what you commit to, and the early stages can read as formal to somebody expecting lightness. What is missing from their side is any evidence that you are enjoying it. Say the enthusiastic thing out loud once a week, since you feel it and it has never once been transmitted.
Play built with the same seriousness
The version that works for you is not spontaneity, which you will not sustain. It is a practice: the instrument taken up properly, the game played at a real standard, the craft learned to the point where it is satisfying. Put pleasure on the same footing as work and you will actually do it.
Permission arrives late and it does arrive
For a long stretch you treated romance as something to be deserved through achievement, and the arrangement was never examined because nobody challenged it. It can be set down. Do one thing in a relationship purely because you want to, with nothing earned beforehand, and notice that the ground holds perfectly well.
Creative work that survives a professional standard
When you make something you make it properly, and the result stands up next to work by people who do it full time. What stops you is the belief that it does not count unless it is your occupation. Show it to somebody in the field this year and let their assessment replace yours, since yours has been wrong about this for a decade.
The young ones feel the standard
You want the children in your life to do well and you have communicated that clearly, sometimes more clearly than you intended. What they need alongside it is evidence that you enjoy their company when they are achieving nothing at all. Spend one occasion where nothing is assessed and nothing is being taught.
Leisure that has to have a function
Your recreation tends to double as something productive: the run that is training, the reading that is useful, the weekend away that also fixes a problem. Friends who invite you to do nothing at all have mostly stopped asking, and you may not have noticed them stopping. Accept the next pointless invitation and let it stay pointless from beginning to end, including in how you describe it afterwards.
Recovery is a discipline, not a reward
You will train, work and push consistently and treat rest as the thing that happens if there is time, which there is not. The joints, the back and sleep quality carry the shortfall. Schedule recovery as an obligation with a name attached, since obligations are the only category you have ever honoured reliably.