Happiness is an extremely loaded term. It means completely different things to different people.

And it's difficult to talk about because everybody has strong preconceived notions of what happiness is and how they would get to it.

I'm going to conflate happiness and pleasure and peace and joy and bliss. I'm going to mix them up.

I'm not doing so deliberately, but at the same time, this is not math. We cannot clearly bound these words.

They mean different things in different contexts to different people.

So let's just try and get into the spirit of what I'm saying rather than get hung up on specific words and details.

I think that's extremely important when some people are talking about happiness.

They're really talking about pleasure or thrills. Like I had a really good meal. Therefore, I'm happy.

Other people are talking about a general state of contentment and well-being.

Other people are referring to enlightenment. Like a Buddha would have reached.

Many people will take the point of view that there's no such thing as happiness or happiness as counterproductive

where misery comes from pursuing happiness. And there's a lot of truth to this and we'll get into it.

But at the same time, sometimes I'll say the way to be happy is X and people will say,

well, didn't you just say that happiness is a cause of misery? This is not mathematics.

You cannot link algorithms together. This is more like poetry.

If you read 50 different poems from a poet and then you try to map them out analytically and refer words from one poem to another

and see if that made sense, you missed the point. Don't fix it on the words.

Don't even fix it on a sentence as ponder the overall thought process and message.