# How To Achieve Happiness

Pleasure and happiness are two different concepts. While pleasure refers 
to a momentary state of joy, happiness refers more to an overall state of 
fulfillment. You can be very sad for example and still experience the 
pleasure of an orgasm. These concepts are often confused with each other 
and can bring about pleasure-oriented habits that end up undermining our 
happiness. Life is about balancing the two and depending on how much 
perspective we have, you will balance happiness over pleasure. When you 
are younger, it is often the other way around. But this starts shifting as 
we grow older and become more responsible.

Happiness and mainly pleasure is very central to our society. This has a 
lot to do with our conditioning and is paradoxically also the reason why 
so many people end up being depressed. Happiness is not something you can 
work towards, it is rather a state you automatically achieve when you are 
fulfilled. The best way I can explain this is by using a metaphor: you can 
compare your state of mind with an orchestra. When everyone is in sync and 
in tune, you experience harmony. Each musician can be seen as an active 
neural network. Likewise, if you get hungry for example, the neural network 
that is responsible for consuming food becomes louder and louder until you 
eat something. This is similar for all other primal urges and also applies 
to our conditioned needs. If you want a new phone for example, it will 
manifest itself as a neural network that will also be making noise until 
you either get a new phone or re-evaluate whether you really need it. You 
can already see what the problem is when being fixated on happiness. Since 
happiness is automatic when you have a harmonious orchestra, just adding 
this fixation on 'becoming happy' adds a musician or active neural network 
that will bring about disharmony. You literally create a paradoxical 
vicious cycle of ever-growing inner conflict which can only be fixed by 
becoming aware of it. This is supported by studies that show how, as long 
as we feel what we're doing is right, happiness and fulfillment are mostly 
automatic. The same goes for studies showing that people chasing happiness 
are overall less happy. A popular belief that has caught on in the past few 
centuries is that the meaning of life is happiness, but the real meaning of 
life has little to do with happiness itself and more with what causes it.