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

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 b...

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.

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.

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.