Wake up, eat, sports, shower, metro, walk, coffee, croissant, co-working, desk, reading, laptop, pause... "look up". Everyone around you is part of the same machine — staring at their screens. Fighting off one notification after the other. We are calculating machines. We are unhappy creatures seeking happiness. The paradox is that we think we will find happiness by pushing ourselves through the unhappiness. But will happiness ever arrive?
To me the idea of happiness in the day-to-day is pursuing your goals with a decluttered mind and task list (from David Allen, Getting Things Done 2001), with freedom and time to invest in meaningful relationships around you, so that at the end of the day you feel you've grown and you feel enriched because of your experiences. Happiness in the long run is about discovering and finding the gifts of life, the emotions of love, fear, pain, loss you can feel, which make you appreciate all the small things we have. Love and affection, for our close ones and every other human being (as the Dalai Lama explains, if you focus on what you have in common with strangers, you can feel truly connected and feel love for them, then you'll never feel alone (The Art Of Happiness 2017). On a third (highest) level, happiness in a lifetime, is to truly see, to truly listen, to truly feel - it sounds like the simplest but it's the most difficult one to grasp. From Krishnamurti (The Urgency of Change 1909): This seeing is intelligence. Seeing is not the cultivation of intelligence. Seeing is more important than intelligence, or happiness, or unhappiness. There is only seeing or not seeing. All the rest—happiness, unhappiness, and intelligence—are just words.
Will you ever find happiness? Someone very close to me used to say that I was never satisfied. Perhaps that's why you always push for more. Sometimes I think that I am happy, other times I think that am not. It doesn't matter really, as I just try my best. I love this from Seneca (Hardship and Happiness 4 BCE–65 CE), “Wherever we go, the two finest attributes will go with us— universal nature and individual virtue. Fear less, love more. Try your best.