[MikeCapone]

The book 'Stumbling on Happiness' by Dan Gilbert is great on this topic.

People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.

[truncate]

Adding to that, I'm reading Antidote by Oliver Burkeman. One of the points that I really related to was that more you think about happiness, more likely you will find yourself unhappy. Essentially the pursuit/expectation of happiness paradoxically will make your brain think of all the things wrong in your life. I don't know how it started, I think that's been true for me. I never thought about happiness when I was young. There were things that were not perfect -- not enough money, no girlfriend, not having clarity on what to do next, failures, envy in general -- but I was still much happier relatively and I was by no means thinking about happiness back then. Just accepted it is what it is, and kept going on with life.

[fullshark]

Seems like the only happy people are retired or wealthy people to me...