I think people confuse happiness and “happy events” too often and try to demonize hedonism by tying it to “capitalist treadmills” and wage slavery. Look, “Happ

I think people confuse happiness and “happy events” too often and try to demonize hedonism by tying it to “capitalist treadmills” and wage slavery. Look, “Happy events” like buying some cool new thing, or going to a fancy party, or the birth of a child are of course temporary feelings of happiness. Yes that should be obvious, the point is to keep steady streams of these sort of happy events in your life. “Happiness” is a state, not tied to a particular event, it is a feeling. You get there by finally building structure into your life that easily allows for the creation of “happy events” with little effort. It is analogous to eating a good meal and being well fed. No one expects a few good meals to suddenly make them well fed, you must constantly eat meals to reach a state where you can be considered well fed and you must keep eating beyond that to maintain the status of being well fed. Happiness is something like that. A state of happiness without the occurrence of new happy events eventually deteriorates, unless you can lower the bar for happy events so low that merely being alive makes you happy. But it is very difficult and I don’t recommend it, because overstimulation of happiness makes it difficult to determine if you are actually happy. You must occasionally be unhappy to know this. Some people that are happy just because they are alive might not really be happy at all. A dystopian thought.