I’m trying to figure out where this thought came from, trying to tease apart my memory to determine who taught this to me, or how I learned it. For as far as I can remember, I’ve taken it as a personal article of faith that you cannot really chase happiness. Maybe it’s just an extrapolation of the conventional wisdom that you can’t buy happiness. But happiness is not something acquirable, certainly not like you can obtain the newest iPhone, or even the acquiescence of corrupt politicians in certain regions of the world of ill-repute. You can’t realistically set a goal like “in 3 months, I will be happy”, certainly not the same way you can say “in 3 months, I will lose 20 pounds” or even “in 3 months, I will be married.”

Happiness is, in a way, a by-product. It’s the result of some other, more concrete accomplishment. Asking a djinni in a lamp for happiness is nonsensical. First, you have to figure out what it is that makes you happy.

Then again, I don’t really know what happiness is. From a purely intellectualized, dispassionate perspective, I can actually identify points in my life where I would consider myself to be happy (even if, eventually, that happiness dissipated, often in extremely calamitous circumstances.) But I don’t remember how it feels. I am actually not certain I would recognize happiness if it bit me in the ass.

It was also a personal article of faith that there was a meaningful distinction between contentment and happiness. Like, I would actually say that, these days, I am (relatively) content. Sure, I have my regrets, and sure, I have a large collection of unfulfilled dreams and abandoned hopes, but things aren’t awful. I am (mostly) not suffering. But the distinction I used to make between the two eludes me. Maybe it was just a matter of degree. Maybe it was just an illusory distinction that I made at a time when I was nowhere near either happiness or contentment.

Then again, there’s the whole reductionist, materialistic, neuroscientific explanation. Happiness, like any other emotion, is some particular pattern of neurons firing in the brain. In this sense, I would make a distinction between euphoria and happiness. Euphoria is an instantaneous sensation, triggered by discrete events. Happiness is a more long-lived pattern, or maybe a pattern of patterns. I’m not really sure if it’s significantly different from euthymia, the more I think about it.

But the distinction between an acute sensation versus a chronic condition is important. You can chase euphoria—which is essentially what adrenaline junkies do. You can even buy euphoria: cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, etc., etc. But as anyone coming down from a massive high will tell you, this probably isn’t the same thing as happiness. Maybe.