I’ve never been more wary of “happiness” as a first-class concept in my thinking or in dialogues with others. I now prefer to explicitly decompose it to “contentment” and “aliveness”.

Contentment is the Pascal-ian, able to sit alone in a room with no stimuli, half of happiness. Think of a cat or dog sat smugly in the afternoon sun. Aliveness is part vgr’s life spirit distillation and part Csikszentmihalyi-ian flow state. The best example might be being challenged by a situation to do better at something that you’re already good at.

Being contented and feeling alive are noble Sisyphean pursuits, and they’re much more tractable to achieve and reason about than the ever-problematic happiness we all obsess over.