Lowering one’s expectations

Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you acquire. It is something you are.
This implies that happiness is not a goal that you can reach. It is a side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences.

While pleasure is correlated with happiness, pursuing pleasure does not cause happiness.

People who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious and less happy in the long run. Pleasure is necessary, but it's insufficient.

We don't always need to be positive, even if that is constantly marketed to us. We will have trouble. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made that make us negative. It's all part of life.

Negative emotions are necessary, but we need to learn to express them in a socially acceptable way that aligns with our values.

Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating chocolate.
These activities involve pain, struggle, even anger, and despair. But once you have completed them, you look back and feel happy because these kinds of events allow us to become our ideal selves.

Achieving a difficult long-term goal makes us happy. But once you reach the goal, there will be another thing to pursue to make you happy.

That is because our ideal self is always a few steps away from us. What matters is not that we achieve the plateaus of success, but that we're continually moving towards them.