Happiness

It seems that everyone wants to be happy, or almost everyone. What makes us happy? Is pleasure the same thing as happiness? If not, does pleasure make us happy? Is ignorance bliss? Does religion make us happy?

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality." - George Bernard Shaw

Einstein said: "If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things." Epicurus believed that the recipe for happiness is having friends, freedom and time to think. In Buddhism, the path to achieving happiness is by giving up cravings, thus ending suffering. Some people say that the secret to happiness is having low expectations.

People tend to fall back to a neutral state after they get the thing that makes them happy. For example, if you buy a new car, you might be happy for a while but after some months, happiness fades and is eventually taken over by neutrality. So, if you want to be happy continually, should you buy a new thing continually? I think not. I don't believe that possessions make us happy. We are conditioned by society to believe that.

The odd thing is that choice actually makes us unhappy. When we buy something and we choose from a lot of products, we tend to ask ourselves: have we bought the best one? What if the other one was better? This makes us more unhappy with the product we bought.

We have the capacity to synthesize happiness. It's all in our mind.
"I am the happiest man alive, I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity and I am more invulnerable than Achilles, fortune hath not one place to hit me." - Sir Thomas Browne

See this:
Why are we happy?
A guide to happiness.
The paradox of choice.