a definition of "happiness"
happiness:
something that happens,
when you're excited about where you're going,
and you're enjoying the journey to get there.
this definition is probably wrong. but it's the best i have right now.
in case it's useful to someone similar to a Past Sam, my previous (wrong) definitions of happiness have included:
being able to eat ice cream whenever i want
becoming a professional baseball player when i grow up
everyone around me likes me
having a prestigious and/or high paying and/or impactful job
having a family
experiencing as many pleasurable feelings as possible
maximizing the "compensation per hour" i earn from my job
minimizing the "number of hours" i work at my job
working on an Important problem to make the world A Better Place
i would argue all of these definitions of happiness are wrong.
many of these things likely make some people happy, some of the time. but i would argue those people are happy not because they have a good job / have a family / have lots of pleasurable feelings / etc. i would argue they're happy because they're excited about where they're going, yet also enjoying the journey to get there.
a curious thing about "growing up" is you never seem to actually know what happiness is. you just get better at knowing what happiness is not.