Who’s ‘we’ kimosabe? 
Seriously, even if one IS a ‘basic 9-to-5 deadhead robot’, happiness is what you make of it. Even if your job sucks, that doesn’t mean your life has too…and even if your life sucks, it doesn’t mean you can’t hunt down a little happiness here or there and beat that som’biatch into submission from time to time.
-XT
“We are all about as happy as we think we are”. I forgot who said that, Honest Abe?
Happiness comes from inside of us not outside of us. You can’t buy it or sell it.
There is a new Book out called ‘The Happiness Project’. I have been reading the blog for a while just because I like the concept. Lots of useful information and quotes etc.
I never think of wanting too much happiness because that is unrealistic. Life has ups and downs and I would never appreciate a good day if I never had a bad day. Like all the rain we had this month and flooding makes me appreciate these last few sunny warm days.
There are a long list of personal and social benefits to happiness though. It isn’t solely good for subjective enjoyment.
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~sonja/
It is a stereotype, but if you ask people who is more likely to be a good parent, a good employee and a good citizen; the happy and content person vs the miserable, depressed person they are going to pick the happy and content person.
Life is full of blows, however my impression is happy people generally deal with them better in the sense that they will have more social support, be more proactive, have more self control, etc.
So yes happiness based on treating hedonism as the only thing important in life and ignoring the problems in the real world is bad. But how much of happiness is based on that? I really don’t know.
I also disagree with the OP that a sense of entitlement is bad. A sense of entitlement for something better seems like it could be directed in improving peoples quality of life. If women didn’t feel entitled to vote, they wouldn’t have stood up for that right. At the same time the women who realized there was something wrong with not being allowed to vote but who deluded themselves with false happiness about other stuff weren’t helping either. If people didn’t feel entitled to live in a world free of hurt, pain and injustice they wouldn’t work to make it happen. Then again they might just become bitter and cynical, or become deluded.
I also think that it is incorrect to think of happiness as a good thing and unhappiness as a bad thing; unhappiness is a much better motivator than happiness. We get things done from unhappiness; people and civilizations move forward because of unhappiness. Unhappiness/discontent is the yin to happiness/contentedness’s yang; one is no better or worse than the other - both are necessary.
I find it odd to say that unhappiness is inherently a motivator. When I am depressed, sometimes I feel completely unmotivated. Other times, I feel angry and want to fix something. When I am anxious, sometimes I feel like I need to fix it. Other times I feel disabled, like I can’t do anything until the anxiety resolves.
I think that, while unhappiness can be a motivator, it is not necessarily one. And while unhappiness can provide a lack of motivation, I can do a lot more happy than depressed.
I think Cat Whisperer’s point was that unhappiness drove most of the early civilizations and cultures to strive for better…and, happiness wasn’t always a good thing. Off the top of my head and to illustrate what I think was CW’s point, consider Egypt and the Mongol’s. In the case of Egypt, they were an overall happy and content civilization, self contained and assured of their superiority…until the Hyksos (sp?) invasion, which came as a rather rude eye opener to them. And it was their unhappiness at being invaded and occupied that eventually lead them to both throw out the invaders and begin their own period of empire and expansion. Conversely, the Mongol’s were perennially unhappy and dissatisfied, and this lead them eventually to unite and embark on the road to conquest.
Obviously I’m painting with a broad brush here, and glossing over a lot (plus, I’m no historian, having a very History Channel-esque knowledge of the finer points of history :p), but I think there are plenty of examples to demonstrate that a little unhappiness can be a good thing…and that happiness and contentedness is not always for the best, at least from the standpoint of a civilization.
-XT
My flash of insight on happiness, which came from observing an invariably cheerful classmate at college 25 years ago, is that in general you are as happy as you choose to be. Before then I was a typical sullen adolescent. Since then I too have chosen to be happy, and it’s been a good life so far. Nothing has caused me to change my mind that it is as simple as setting the dial wherever you like between 0 and 11.
This probably doesn’t work too well if your house burns down or spouse dies slowly of a horrible disease, but for dealing with traffic jams and bad weather and disappointing meals and unreliable friends and not having the latest iPod and making a stupid post on the SDMB, it works.
Go in peace
Sandwich
PS I am sympathetic with unhappy people, but I don’t encourage their moaning. Life is too short to wallow in miserableness.
Ok, metaphysical and religeous stuff aside, what exactly is “happiness”? Wikipedia defines it as “a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy.” While much of your happiness is determined by genetics, there are other contributors as well. The quality of your interpersonal relationships, having a string support network, performing activities that you find interesting and meaningful, satisfaction and success in your career, and so on. These are generally positive things so it is silly to suggest one could want “too much” happiness.
I think the problem, and maybe what the OP was getting at, is that in our society, we are constantly bombarded with messages telling us what “should” make us happy. Being rich, good looking, famous, driving the right car, wearing the right clothes etc. This creates a sort of cognitive dissonance where most people are constantly being told they aren’t happy and end up believing it.
Having ‘stuff’ can’t make you happy. I read a letter to an advice columnist once from a woman who ran off to live with a rich man against her family’s wishes. They cut each other off and stopped speaking. She wrote she had all the stuff - jewelry, McMansion, car - but when holidays came around, she cried all day because she missed her sisters and their children, she missed preparing the meal with her mother and watching the game with her father. She coped by drinking more and more and was going to have to go into rehab. All because she chose things over relationships. So there.
Not only necessary–inescapable. The seeds for both happiness and unhappiness, or maybe it’s more accurately called contentment and discontent, are inherently built into every single situation we ever find ourselves in, because everything in life is a trade-off of some type. Jobs are a trade-off of amount/type of work versus money. Homes are a trade-off of space/comfort against cost and effort of upkeep. Hobbies are a trade-off of enjoyment against time and money. Loved ones are a trade-off of love and support against vulnerability and those tiny little things that drive you straight up the damn wall. In essence, Poison had it right: every rose does have its thorn.
There’s a saying somewhere along the lines that some people cry about the fact that roses have thorns, and others are delighted that thorns have roses. While that’s true, I don’t think that happiness is directly a matter of whether you focus on the roses or the thorns, but rather that those things are expressions of the root distinction. How happy you are, overall, is a function of how readily you accept that the roses have thorns, they always have had thorns, they always will have thorns, and sitting around bitching ain’t gonna get rid of the damn thorns. People who accept the thorns don’t get all bent out of shape when they get stuck, they just pull out the sticker, suck on the wounded finger a minute, and get on with putting the roses in the vase. People who don’t accept the thorns toss the roses down and go off on a rant about why there are damn thorns on their flowers, and OMG it huuuuuurrrrttttsssss. Which group do you think gets more enjoyment out of their flowers?
All things we hide from and don’t wish to acknowledge. How very right you are.
I guess part of my question was reaching for a kind of Newtonian law of metaphysics (and yes, it does sound absurd, and no, I don’t know why I’d want such a thing any more than you might).
I believe, for reasons I cannot fully articulate, that negativity is both a sink and a source of psychic energy. It squanders much of our motivation and our purpose, but at the same time, nothing could happen without it being generated. Not just as an incidental, “that’s how the cookie crumbles” phenomenon of everyday existence, but as an essential by-product of positive work and energy.
What’s more, negative energy is both more easily produced and more easily accessed than positive energy. There is simply more of it out there. Where most of us fail is in being able to use it positively.
The people who find life, love, work, etc., to be a worthwhile tradeoff are the people who somehow find the key to converting that essential negative energy - frustration, doubt, fear, suspicion, jealousy, resentment, onandonandon - into simple brute work energy. (It can never be truly positive - only its outcomes can be.)
It’s not a skill that everyone can even learn. Those of us with depressive or bipolar disorders, for instance, are not likely to balance the system for ourselves short of learning a kind of obsessive masochism. There is a reason they call it “work,” and that the kind that is particularly valuable and admired is “hard work” (and not just physically hard, but mentally, psychically and emotionally difficult). There is a reason that before a work ethic can be truly ennobling, it must first be a little bit harsh and unforgiving: work first, then ethics.
But it just seems possible, under my twisted little calculus of every joy for a pain and every pain for a joy, that most hedonistic, happiness-valuing people would become more fully actualized and realized human beings if they resolved to embrace the negatives of life as fully as the positives.
The hallmark of every generation that survived, that built or did or meant anything through history, was grim determination. Maybe in order to be more determined, we must first become more grim.
Unhappiness (or discontent) as a motivator comes from not liking your current situation; if you were perfectly fine with how things are, you would have no motivation to change anything. xtisme has some good examples of that. On a smaller scale, if you are content at your job, you have little motivation to go out and try to find a different one; if you are discontented at your job, you’ll be much more motivated to make the effort it takes to improve your situation.
Speaking more psychologically, I’m a co-leader of an anxiety support group in real life. One thing that is almost universal is that people who have excessive anxiety in their lives are highly motivated to make changes that will lessen their anxiety.
You could argue that if things are good and everyone’s happy and content, you have no reason to change everything, but that would lead to stagnation - people and civilizations need change and growth and rejuvenation. In my opinion, of course. 
I believe it is the cognitive comparisons between your ideal life and your real life, and seeing how they match up. The more overlap the more happiness. The more disconnect the more misery and depression.
However, what is an ‘ideal’ life?
This, not surprisingly, is precisely the opposite of my own thinking. There are no gifts; everything must be earned. What happens to us is not as important as how we deal with it.
I agree with the sentiments of the OP and others here.
I think in today’s self-help self-conscious world, people are inclined to think that if they’re not happy all the time then they aren’t doing life “right”. It’s BS: we’re just not wired that way.
Part of the problem too is the philosophy that the meaning of life is to be happy, and that aiming to maximise happiness is what motivates virtually all actions.
I for one dispute this. The carrot and stick are a key part of our psychology, but they do not choose our actions.
(A thread on this specific point ran and ran, so this may be opening a can of worms. But it’s relevant to the OP, so I went there.)
That’s possibly one of the bleakest philosophies I can think of. There IS no “home” to go to if you’re waiting for your life to end to go to it. You have to grasp happiness in the here and now because there ain’t nothin’ else.
Still, look at all John Jay accomplished, either because of that conviction or in spite of it. He was surely one of the fortunate ones who was able to turn negative energy into working energy.
The trick, for us modern skeptics, may be to turn the bleakness up to 11 and still get the job done - to be able to work side by side with frustration, futility and fear, with no promise of reward in a next world we don’t believe in. Not even because it will change things or matter in this world, because you can’t believe in that either. But just, I suppose, because we Ought. Because we’ve Got it Coming to Us. FWTW.
(I don’t know if you feel you’ve Got it Coming to You. I have. I’ve had it far too easy in life, and I’m now paying the karmic price.)
I don’t have sufficient vocabulary to articulate how much I loathe this kind of thinking. All happiness (as well as unhappiness) is “of this world.” It’s all we’ve got, and I can’t think of any “duty” that’s more important than happiness.
But I do agree that genuine happiness has nothing to do with “hedonistic pleasure.”
Exactly.
Hard to say because it’s different for every person. However, I think people become unhappy when other people’s version of an “ideal” life is thrust on them and they feel they must conform to it.
It could be, though, that society as a whole would be better off if people once again made their peace with at least some degree of conformity.
There is no society without some conformity, and right now I think our problem is too much of the wrong kind (clothes, material tastes, political groupthink) and not enough of the kind that builds community and allows us to rely on one another (sorry, no concrete examples).
There are conservatives out there (I’m not one; I’m just a devil’s advocate) who lay most of society’s problems to social individualism. (Economic individualism is generally welcomed by said folks.) It’s an extreme position, but could it not be true that some benefits could be realized by people putting aside some of their desires, and even their needs, for the sake of all of us? And can it happen in any other way than crushing people’s souls? That works, but it has undesirable side effects.