Generation Bubble

Hooked on Hedonics: Happiness as the Universal of Feeling

We do not know what happiness is. Like obscenity, perhaps, we think we know it when we see it. But if we actually understood and knew happiness, we probably would not spend so much time, money and effort pursuing the things that are supposed to bring happiness, and would instead simply pursue happiness. But happiness slips away as soon as we examine it. Always represented as freedom from worry or want, happiness is known only through its opposite, the unhappy state of never-ending thirst for something more that successive and compulsive purchases can never quite quench. Happiness seems to exist not so much as an experienced subjective state, but as the echo from a distant future or past of a life beyond what is currently possible.