Damn! I just had this conversation with my daughter when she came home from school yesterday. In U.S. culture, people seem to be under the misguided impression that happiness should drop out of the sky. Or that the people you see as happy were somehow touched by God or that “fate” smiled down upon them. As for the rest of us, we are doomed to suffer our entire lives. What a crock of bullshit.
I believe you are right, @Storms, in that part of it is due to our Declaration of Independence. Poeple focus on the word “happiness” as though it means happiness comes automatically to us because we were born on the right patch of dirt. The document also includes the phrase ”.....promote the general welfare….”. All that means is that fairness and justice are ideals focused on in order to pave the way toward happiness, not actually provide it.
You have to work for happiness exactly like everything else good that you get. I told my daughter that, as long as she focused on all the little negative things that occur on any given day, it would eat away at her happiness like a cancer. She is 11, and is just now getting to the point that she can fully understand that it is she who controls her degree of happiness. She is not helpless in the matter, nor is she dependent upon outside resources.