Let’s drive this hopelessly into the realm of abstraction. Let us say that your current Happiness Quotient is 1. Let us say that if you lose your job and decline in status, it will go down; and if you get promoted and advance your career, it will NOT go up permanently. Most successes have short shelf lives. It will stay at 1, perhaps advance to a 1.1 or 1.2 once you get a corner office.
If you work your ass off and get your dream job, and your dream S.O. (S is Significant), then you advance perhaps to 1.5, with the same risks of decline if status or relationship change negatively.
Posit, however, that you invest money and time directly on the “happiness process”. Let us say that you are a 1, but with work and time advance to a 2 that is NOT TIED directly to external validation. Let us say that you learn to keep the 2 even if you wind up living in a yurt in a rural county next to a pig farm.
Is this not smarter than pursuing happiness indirectly? I think it is.
Being a modest, unassuming soul, I plan to write a book entitled “Saving the world”, or perhaps “How we do it (survive)”. One core point I want to make is that consumerism, conspicuous consumption, greed, excess: none of these are NEEDED for human happiness. There are groups who want to use FORCE to make us live lives which require less material stuff.
But why can we not reach such states voluntarily? As one example, I proposed perhaps 4-5 years ago that it would be INTERESTING if the primary determinant of house status was not size, but how cleverly it was constructed, how cleverly it was built, how well it blended with its setting.
And to that end I proposed many things. Paints that change color. Pipes running through the house showing if it is raining or not. Smoke in tubes that gets disturbed when wind is present.
And of course all SORTS of possibilities exist in the external structure of such houses, which are very small inside.