What is happiness?

Everyone wants happiness, don’t they? But sometimes this question comes up in my mind: What is Happiness? I’ve thought about it quite a few times, and frankly, I haven’t come up with any conclusion to it.

Now, I shall pen my thoughts down in black and white, my thoughts about what is happiness. Is happiness a state of mind? Or is it something else? Is it what you feel when you win the lottery? Is it what you feel when your child scores straight As? Or is it both? I think it depends. I feel that there are different types of happiness, one being the temporary, where you feel happy about an event, and that passes as the event passes. The other would be longer. It is what you feel when you have a wife/husband of your dreams and you she/he loves you a lot. It is also what you feel when you live everyday of your life as though it is your last.

Why do we feel happy? I feel that I have to at least talk about this as it (I believe) is part of the question. Why do we feel happy? It may be because we see, do, hear, taste etc something we like very much. For example, we could feel happy when we eat something we like, we could also feel happy when we hear music or sounds we like. Why do we like those things? This would link to our personalities, and that would be too far away from the main point.

There is no way a person would be happy everyday about everything every time, because for that to happen, he/she would have to have everything, have nothing, control everything, control nothing and the feeling of content, he/she would also have to have a child, have no children etc. The list can go on and on, with most of them contradicting each other.

And now I conclude my passage with no conclusion at all, for who will know what exactly happiness is? Or is there no such thing as happiness, for it is only a label?