The most interesting sentence is the title of the piece. Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want t

The most interesting sentence is the title of the piece. Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy. Roger Scruton in "On Beauty" made a related point about erotic art and porn. What distinguishes the latter from the former is that porn is really about the experience the viewer gets out of it, the object is interchangeable and even degraded (literally humans reduced to body parts). Whereas erotic art requires 'disinterested interest'. that is judgement without reference to one's desires. It elevates, which is why there is beauty in erotic art but not pornography. Almost always when people talk about how to 'feel happy' they're really after the same kind of thing that Scruton says pornography satisfies. The much more meaningful thing is to look for beauty, which like truth or goodness is pursued for its own sake. That's arguably more meaningful, and it has little to do with whether you feel happy or sad about it.