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✅ 8. Happiness: The Psychological Standard Of Value

Definition of Happiness:
The feeling, belief and approval that ones life or an aspect of it, is true, good and non-contradictory.

Happiness is the emotional experience of evaluating reality as good for one’s life.

It is a conceptual relationship one establishes between themselves and their internal or external values.

Happiness is the cognitive-emotional experience of feeling positive connection to what you deem valuable. You can feel happy about your body because you've built a fantastic physique. You can feel happy about the business you’ve created because you can now afford the luxuries you desire.

It's the long-range emotional reward for coherent living — the confirmation that one’s life makes sense and is worth continuing.

It's not simply a dopamine spike, fleeting mood, chemical hit or comforting illusion, and not something that can be bestowed by external manipulation.

It's the long-range emotional result of living in accordance with one’s nature.

It's the integrated emotional signature of a life functioning well over time.

Happiness is the “cognitive-psychological fuel” that makes continued living desirable. It is not a luxury. It is the normal state of a mind functioning in harmony with life.

It is the mind’s approval of one’s actions, values, and trajectory.

Where flourishing on the biological level represents your physical health and success,
happiness describes flourishing of your psychological health and success.

✅ B. Humans Need Happiness For Survival: The Psychological Standard Of Value 

In this axiology, human value has two interlocking standards:

1. Biological Life — The Axiomatic Standard

Life is the fundamental alternative.
 One must be alive in order to pursue or experience anything at all.
 Biological flourishing — physical health, functional capacity, and the ability to act in the world — is the natural, inescapable expression of life’s requirements.

This is the metaphysical base:
 Without life, no action is possible.
 Without action, no values are possible.
 Without values, no happiness is possible.

2. Happiness — The Psychological Standard

While life is the metaphysical precondition, happiness is the psychological feedback of a life that is flourishing.

Happiness is not a luxury or pragmatic preference.
It is the mind’s confirmation that existence is worth sustaining.

It is the emotional signal that one’s:

• Values are attainable,

• Efforts are meaningful,

• Identity is integrated,

• And reality is not an enemy.

A human being cannot remain psychologically functional without the conviction that life is worth living. This conviction is experienced emotionally as happiness — the felt approval of one’s life.

3. Why Happiness Is Necessary For Survival

A psychology deprived of meaning, integrity, and self-value becomes volatile, it can implode or explode, and sometimes without warning. Happiness is not optional; it is the psychological standard of survival.

Humans are not bacteria.
 We do not operate on stimulus and reflex.
We require reasons to act, meaning to strive, and hope to endure the inevitable burdens of existence.

When happiness is perceived to be impossible, one does not merely feel sad — they lose the motive to live. They self destruct.
 The psyche collapses into:

• Apathy

• Addiction

• Rage

• Desperation

• Depression

• Hopelessness

• Powerlessness

• Nihilism

• Suicide

Happiness is the psychological fuel of a rational life.

It is the mind’s “Yes” to existence.

4. Happiness As Psychological Flourishing

If biological flourishing is the body functioning according to its nature,
then happiness is the mind functioning according to its nature:

• Integrated rather than fragmented

• Value-oriented rather than aimless

• Reality-focused rather than delusional

• Self-respecting rather than self-annihilating

• Purposeful rather than stagnant

A person may be biologically alive while being psychologically dead.
 One may survive physically while imploding mentally.

The capacity for happiness is what makes life worth living. Without it, mere continuation becomes empty, even torturous. Life-for-the-sake-of-life, absent the possibility of happiness, degenerates into meaningless persistence, like a tumor growing without purpose.

But to live as man qua man — to live as the kind of being one is — requires psychological flourishing, not mere physical continuation.

Happiness is the psychological expression of the fact that life ought to flourish.
It is the mental and emotional declaration that life ought not move toward death.

Happiness is the sign that one is psychologically flourishing.

5. The Dual-Standard Clarified

“If life is the standard, why isn’t mere survival enough?”

Answer: Because man is not a plant. For a conceptual, volitional consciousness, psychological death is real death (and can even be worse). Happiness is therefore not a side quest—it is the psychological analogue of biological flourishing.

• Biological life: The axiomatic standard — you must be alive.

• Happiness: The psychological standard — you must have a mind capable of valuing life and wanting to continue it.

One without the other is unsustainable.

Life without happiness becomes hollow persistence.
 Happiness without life is impossible.

Proper human value requires both:

• Life as the foundation,

• Happiness as the lived experience of wanting more life, not out of fear, but desire

6. Why Axiology Must Include Both Standards

A theory of value is incomplete if it speaks only of physical survival with no psychological dimension, or only of psychological states without grounding in biological reality.

Objective axiology corrects this by integrating them:

• Physical flourishing is the body’s successful mode of existence.

• Happiness is the mind’s successful mode of existence.

To value is to act to sustain both.

✅ C. Godhood Without Happiness Is Pointless

Even if one lived a billion years and possessed unlimited wealth, knowledge, fame, power, or godlike abilities, none of it would matter if they weren't happy. A miserable king is still miserable. An all powerful, joyless being is a meaningless combination. External greatness does not compensate for internal emptiness. Without happiness, every achievement is hollow, and even omnipotence would be pointless.

If one were a genius with optimal health, an unspendable amount of money, the dream relationship, perfect lifestyle and complimented by super powers, without happiness, what does it mean? What is the value of it? Life only has value when it is lived in such a way that the individual can truly experience fulfillment, purpose, and joy.

✅ D. The Dual Structure Of Approval: Particular Vs. Global

Does one have to be happy about everything in general or just happy about something in particular to be happy?

Happiness operates on two distinct but interrelated levels:

1. Particular Approval

2. Global Approval

Both follow the core definition — an emotional approval based on the belief that something is true, good, and non-contradictory.

Approval is the judgement that a standard is being met in relation to a value.

1. Approval Of A Particular Aspect Of Reality: Particularity

This is happiness “about something,” a focused emotional response to a specific value.

Particular approval = Particular happiness

Particularity is your approval focused in a narrow scope on a part of yourself or the world.

Examples:

• Happy with your body fat percentage

• Happy about the essay you just wrote

• Happy with a friendship

• Happy about an artwork

• Happy about a restaurant dinner

Particular approval is targeted and value-specific.

• It can coexist with sadness elsewhere in life.

• It does not require your entire life to be in order.

You can be:

• Happy with your career, unhappy with your dating life

• Happy with your relationships, unhappy with your finances

• Happy with your achievements, unhappy about your family

• Happy with the world, unhappy with yourself

• Happy with yourself, unhappy with the world

Happiness is the emotional reward for approval in a particular value domain.

2. Globalization: Approval Of One’s Life As A Whole

Global approval is the cognitive evaluation from believing:

“My life, taken as a whole, is good and non-contradictory.”

Global approval = Global happiness

It’s the aggregate of all the individual particular approvals combined into a whole.

• Particular approval provides the building blocks of global approval.

“I approve of my health, wealth, love life, character, intelligence, determination etc….and in its entirety, I approve of who I am, what I have, and what I’ve done.”

Global happiness requires that the sum of your positive particular approvals outweighs the negative ones.

This is commonsense: a life mostly filled with dislike, resentment, or frustration cannot be globally approved of.

One’s aggregate of particular approvals needs to be larger than their disapprovals.

Said simply, if you hate more than you love, you’ll struggle to be happy.

Globalization is your approval focused in a general scope on your life as a whole in the world. 

It’s your world view as a daily attitude. 

This level concerns your global self-assessment (in relation to your values), not every detail of the world:

• The integration of your major values (health, wealth, love etc..)

• The alignment of your principles, choices, and character

• Confidence in your ability to improve

• Pride in your agency

• Satisfaction with your identity and long-range trajectory

• A pervasive sense that one is on the right path

• A stable conviction that one’s life is genuinely worth smiling about

Global approval does not mean:

• Approving of all events in the world

• Approving of your past errors

• Eliminating all unhappiness

• Being happy in every domain at once

Rather, it means:

• The trend of your life is positive

• The core structure of your character is coherent

• The future is something you want, not dread

• You experience ongoing pride and emotional stability

• You experience a consistent absence of chronic guilt, contradiction, or nihilism

Global approval is not a fleeting, whimsical mood.
It is a psychological condition, a life-tonality, a sense of life.

It's your general emotional atmosphere, not a momentary feeling.

3. Why The Distinction Matters

Many people mistakenly think:

• They must be happy about everything to be “truly happy.”

• One major failure negates all happiness.

• You can’t be happy if something in the world is wrong.

• You can’t be sad and happy at the same time.

All false.

Human life is complex. Emotional life is multi-layered.

You can experience particular happiness in the midst of global unhappiness (e.g., someone depressed laughing at a joke), and global happiness alongside temporary sadness (e.g., grieving the death of a loved one while still valuing your life).

But one cannot be globally happy without having something to be happy about in particular.

• Global happiness is not just a “mindset” divorced from reality; it is grounded in the actual particulars of your life that you approve of.

Happiness is the reward of living successfully in pursuit of your values.
 If you have nothing you approve of in reality, your life cannot produce the reward of happiness.

4. Happiness's Dual Focus Summary

• Particular Happiness:
  Approval of a particular aspect of life or reality. 

• Global Happiness:
  Approval of one’s life as a unified whole.

To be happy:

• Quantitative: Approve of more parts of your life than you disapprove of.

• Qualitative: Work to have your approved values align into a coherent, non-contradictory whole.

This dual structure captures what happiness actually is:
a layered emotional system tracking your values at multiple scales — the parts and the whole of your life.

✅ E. Direct & Indirect Happiness: Cognitive and Sensory Foundations

Happiness arises whenever we emotionally approve of a value — something we judge as good, true, and non-contradictory.
It can arise in two distinct ways, depending on whether we’re directly interacting with the value or only thinking about it.

This distinction is essential for understanding how emotions work in real life, both cognitively and biologically.

1. Direct Value Interaction: Cognitive + Sensory Happiness

When you are directly engaged with a value — drinking coffee, hugging a friend, listening to music — the resulting happiness includes:

1. Cognitive approval
    (“This is good. I value this.”)

2. Sensory pleasure or bodily affect
    (taste, warmth, comfort, joy, relaxation, excitement)

Direct interaction activates multiple pathways simultaneously:

• The brain’s evaluative systems (complex emotion circuits)

• The brain’s sensory reward pathways (pleasure and motivation circuits)

• The body’s physiological responses (smiling, warmth, relaxation, energy)

This produces happiness that is emotionally meaningful and physically felt.

Example:
 Drinking coffee → pleasure + approval → happiness with sensory intensity.

2. Indirect Value Interaction: Cognitive-Driven Happiness

You can also feel happy about something without currently interacting with it.

This happens through:

• Memory

• Imagination

• Anticipation

• Appreciation of a value’s existence

Indirect happiness still includes genuine emotional approval, but:

• It does not involve direct sensory pleasure

• Its physiological signature is usually lighter (warmth, ease, calm, a smile)

The core mechanism here is cognitive appraisal:

The mind evaluates the value as good, and this evaluation itself produces an emotion.

Example:
 Thinking about coffee, remembering a vacation, or appreciating that a friend exists.

You can literally feel happy right now just by thinking about your best friend who lives 3 000 miles away.

This happiness is real — it simply originates in cognition rather than sensation.

3. Why This Distinction Matters

Both kinds of happiness follow the same basic principle:

Happiness is an emotional approval of a value.
 Direct interaction adds sensory pleasure; indirect interaction does not.

This explains why:

• You can be happy thinking about your goals even before achieving them.

• You can appreciate a value’s existence without direct contact.

• You can love a friend even when they’re not present.

• Emotional life is richer than sensory experience alone.

For scientists, this distinction maps cleanly onto the difference between:

• Cortically driven affect (cognitive appraisal → emotion)

• Subcortical reward responses (sensory pleasure → physiological affect)

For laypeople, it explains why:

• You can feel happy just thinking about something you love.

• Being directly with the value creates a “stronger,” more embodied version of the same emotion.

4. Summary

• Direct Happiness:
  Emotional approval plus sensory pleasure.
   (Drinking the coffee, hugging the friend.)

• Indirect Happiness:
  Emotional approval without sensory pleasure.
   (Thinking about the coffee, appreciating the friend.)

Both are real forms of happiness.
 Both matter.
 And together, they explain how humans can live rich emotional lives even when not constantly interacting with their values.

✅ F. Micro & Macro: Happiness Over Time

Particular vs. global happiness describe what the happiness is about.
Micro vs. macro happiness describe how long the happiness lasts.
 These are two different dimensions of the same emotional system.

(A) The Object of Happiness

• Particular: about a specific value

• Global: about one’s life taken as a whole

(B) The Duration / Temporal Pattern

• Micro: momentary feelings

• Macro: long-term emotional tone

1. Momentary Happiness (“Micro”)

Micro happiness is the temporary emotional experience of approval, lasting seconds, minutes, or hours.
It can arise from any approved value — particular or global.

Examples:

• Joy from beating a friend in a game

• Pride after finishing a piece of work

• Amusement from a funny story

• Satisfaction after eating a cookie

• A warm moment of gratitude for your life as a whole

These moments are meaningful but short-lived;
micro-happiness is the immediate emotional reward for valuing and succeeding.

It rises and falls naturally throughout the day as you interact with — or think about — your values.

2. Life-Satisfaction Happiness (“Macro”)

Macro happiness is your long-term emotional baseline —
an underlying, stable, persistent state that stretches across weeks, months, and years.

It’s your dominant emotional tone.

It’s global approval felt over time.

It looks like:

• Reliably waking up in the morning feeling ready and pumped for the day

• Excited to sleep so you can wake up and do more of what you enjoy

• Anticipating with positivity all the good things you've planned for the short and long term future

• Having an overall lust for more life

• A general baseline of calm, meaning and satisfaction

• Mental stability and consistency of character 

• The feeling that life isn't long enough to do everything you want

• Having so many desires and goals you know you'll never be able to experience them all

• Consistently looking forwards to tomorrows activities

• Happy no matter if it's Monday or Friday

• Wanting to share your enthusiasm with others

• Looking at the clock and feeling relieved it's earlier in the day then you thought

Macro-happiness is not a happy moment here and there — it’s a stance toward existence.

Summary

• Micro Happiness:
   Momentary emotional experiences of approval — short-lived, value-based spikes.

• Macro Happiness:
   A long-term positive emotional baseline — the enduring tone of a life you approve of.

Together, the micro and macro dimensions explain why happiness is both a moment-to-moment feeling and a life-wide orientation.

3. What Creates Macro-Happiness

Macro-happiness emerges from two complementary sources:

1. Quantitative:

You must like more of your life than you dislike.

2. Qualitative:

Your major values must form a coherent, non-contradictory structure —
 clear priorities, aligned choices, self-respect, direction, and pride in your agency.

If you have many particular joys but your life lacks coherence, you get spikes of micro-happiness — not a stable, macro-positive emotional climate.

If your life is coherent but you dislike most of its actual content, macro-happiness is also impossible.

Both are required:
 more approvals than disapprovals, and a meaningful structure that integrates them.

It is happiness experienced not merely as a momentary emotion, but as a worldview:

“Life is good for me. I am living well. I approve of the direction of my existence. I want more.”

4. Expanded Clarification: Cross-Combining the Two Axes

Because “particular vs. global” and “micro vs. macro” are two different axes, they can combine in multiple ways.
 This is a strength — not a complication.

There are four legitimate combinations:

1. Micro-Particular Happiness

A short-lived feeling about a specific value.
 Example:
 “That was a great workout.”

“That coffee was excellent.”

“I had so much fun playing that game.”

2. Macro-Particular Happiness

A long-term, stable approval of a specific domain of your life.
 This is an important addition.

Examples:

• You are consistently happy with your physique, not just in isolated moments.

• You have a stable, lasting appreciation for the lifestyle you’ve created.

• You experience ongoing satisfaction about an intimate relationship, not only during dates or moments of affection.

• You genuinely love your laptop, art, or music as a persistent value — the happiness persists even when you’re not interacting with it.

• You’re always grateful that you have a particular friend

This matters because people don’t “reset to zero” between interactions with a value.
A cherished value can produce a macro-level positive tone in that domain across months or years.

3. Micro-Global Happiness

A brief moment of global approval.

Example:

• Sitting on a hill at sunset thinking,
  “My whole life is going well” →
  a momentary feeling of global happiness.

• Getting stuck into a good book and feeling happy in general about “everything”

• Going out to dinner with a few good friends and feeling glad to be alive

• Watching a movie with a friend and thinking that your life as a totality is really cool

It’s global in scope but micro in duration.

This is crucial because:

• A person can have a moment of global appreciation even if their long-term baseline (macro) is unstable.

• Or, for someone already macro-happy, it’s a moment where their global happiness becomes consciously felt.

4. Macro-Global Happiness

The long-term emotional baseline derived from approving of your life as a whole.

The near constant state of being happy about the majority of your life. 

This is the goal everyone is after, whether they know it or not.

It’s also the hardest to achieve, it takes a deal of time and dedication to accomplish.

Why this matters

This expanded view shows:

• Happiness has content (particular vs. global).

• And it has duration (micro vs. macro).

• These two dimensions combine fluidly in everyday life.

A person can be:

• Macro-particularly happy (loving their body long-term)

• Micro-globally happy (a sudden wave of life-approval)

• Macro-globally happy (long-term life satisfaction)

• Micro-particularly happy (joy from one rep, one joke, one cookie)

This is not confusing — it is complete.

Understanding this provides you a myriad of ways to be happy.

If you get this, it will be hard not to be happy...

Let knowledge weaponize your potential to be happy….and make it an actuality.

✅ G. How Long Must Happiness Last?

Happiness is not measured by counting happy hours.
 The real question is:

Is my psychological baseline fundamentally positive or negative?

1. Don’t Count The Highs: Focus On The Baseline

A rational, psychologically healthy person:

• Feels frequent moments of happiness (micro)

• Lives in a generally positive emotional climate (macro)

• Recovers from disappointment at a reasonable pace

• Does not expect perfect, uninterrupted joy or eternal excitement

Happiness emerges from the ongoing sum of your value-based judgments.
 Every day you make small and large evaluations:

• “My friends are awesome.”

• “I love my work.”

• “My body is getting stronger and leaner”

• “I'm learning so much so quickly.”

• "That coffee was amazing"

Each positive judgment adds to your long-range emotional reservoir.
 Each negative judgment subtracts from it.

Your overall happiness is the net balance of these judgments across time.

When one consistently judges that their major values—work, love, character, purpose, health, achievement—are moving in a good direction, the global emotional tone becomes positive, even if individual days contain frustration or difficulty.

Likewise, if a person repeatedly judges that their core values are failing, stagnating, or contradicting each other, the emotional tone becomes negative, even if there are occasional spikes of pleasure.

So happiness is not:

• Never ending smiles

• The absence of all problems

It is the long-range emotional sum of your judgments about your life’s direction.

If most judgments are affirmative, integrated, and value-oriented, the psyche settles into a fundamentally positive baseline—a truly happy perspective.

2. The Rubber-Band Effect: Emotional Elasticity

A common misconception is that happiness is delicate, easily disrupted, or easily lost.

The opposite is true:

Fragility belongs to the unhappy.
Elasticity belongs to the happy.

Someone lacking macro-happiness has no stable baseline to return to.
 Every negative event feels existential.
 Their emotions are brittle, not elastic.

The globally happy person, by contrast, has psychological resilience built into the structure of their life, not as a special skill but as a natural outcome of living rationally.

A macro-happy person behaves emotionally like an elastic system.
 When stretched by disturbance:

• They bend but don’t break

• They dip but don’t fall apart

• They feel the hit but don’t shatter

• They rebound quickly because their baseline is strong

This is the rubber-band effect:

Macro-happiness creates an emotional elasticity that allows for rapid recovery from disturbances.

Once the immediate crisis is past, their emotional state snaps back to the positive baseline established by their values and life-integration.

This is the same phenomenon you see in healthy animals:
 after a danger passes, they return almost instantly to normal functioning.
 There is no brooding, catastrophizing, or globalizing.
 Humans, when integrated, do something similar — only with conscious philosophical grounding.

✅ H. Happiness vs. Pleasure

Pleasure:

• Momentary sensation

• Can be physical or emotional

• Can come from food, sex, rest, entertainment, novelty

• Does not require achievement, virtue, or meaning

• Can occur even in a disordered or self-destructive life

• Can be detached from long-term well-being

• Always “now,” not “life-level”

Pleasure = “This feels good right now.”
Happiness = “This feels good because I believe it's good for my life.”

Pleasure is a momentary sensation.
Happiness is the emotional result of a judgment about your life. It's value-based emotional cognition.

✅ I. Jordan Belfort Case Study: Pleasure Without Happiness

Jordan Belfort built one of the most spectacular financial empires of the 1990s.

• Private jets, yachts, mansions, models, drugs, cash literally thrown from helicopters.

• At his peak Belfort was worth over $100 million.

• He described himself as “ecstatic,” “on top of the world,” and “living like a rock star.”

Yet he never experienced genuine happiness.

He ran a classic pump-and-dump fraud. He and his firm deliberately inflated worthless stocks, lied to clients, stole their money, and cashed out before the collapse. Every dollar of his wealth was unearned and built on the destruction of other people’s lives.

Pleasure vs. Happiness

• Pleasure: constant, massive, chemically amplified spikes of dopamine and adrenaline.

• Happiness: the non-contradictory, earned emotional state of deep approval of one’s life — impossible when the foundation is fraud.

Why Contradiction Destroys Happiness

Jordan knew, at some level, that everything was stolen. That knowledge never slept. It showed up as paranoia, rage, addiction, screaming fits at employees and family, and the need to get higher and higher to silence the noise. The moment the FBI closed in, the entire emotional structure collapsed overnight — panic, betrayal, despair, and eventually prison.

A genuinely happy person does not implode the instant the external props are removed. Jordan did. That proves the feeling was counterfeit: pleasure riding on a mountain of evasion, not the calm, enduring approval of a life lived with internal coherence.

He had the intensity of pleasure, but never the serenity of happiness — and certainly never the reflective knowledge that his joy was justified.

Jordan is the perfect exhibit: you can be drowning in money, sex, and drugs and still be psychologically bankrupt. Pleasure is cheap. Happiness requires non-contradiction.

✅ J. Why Happiness Must Be Non-Contradictory 

Happiness cannot coexist with contradiction because contradiction destroys the very conditions that make genuine happiness possible.

A contradiction means:

• Wanting mutually incompatible values

• Acting against one’s own principles or long-term interests

• Holding beliefs that clash with reality

• Pursuing goals that undermine other goals

Contradiction fractures the self.

1. Emotional Conflict Cancels Happiness

Happiness is an integrated emotional state — the mind’s unified approval of reality and of one’s own actions.

But contradiction divides the psyche:

• One part says “Yes,” another says “No.”

• One value is affirmed, another is betrayed.

• One desire is pursued, another is damaged.

A divided mind cannot experience lasting happiness; at best it produces emotional oscillation: joy sabotaged by guilt, pride overshadowed by anxiety, excitement tainted by fear of self-betrayal.

Happiness requires wholeness, not inner civil war.

2. Contradiction Corrupts The Cognitive Basis Of Happiness

Happiness is a judgment:
“This is good for my life.”

If that judgment is to be valid, it must correspond to reality.
 Contradiction is the rejection of reality — the attempt to hold incompatible premises at once.

A contradictory life produces:

• Confused values

• Unclear priorities

• Impulsive decisions

• Chronic self-doubt

• The inability to trust one’s own emotions

You cannot be happy about what you cannot trust.

3. Contradiction Destroys Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is:
“I deserve to live.”

To act in contradiction is to undercut one’s own ability to live:

• Cheating undermines integrity.

• Irresponsibility undermines pride.

• Cowardice undermines self-respect.

• Addiction undermines confidence and clarity.

• Sacrifice undermines personal worth.

Every contradiction chips away at the very foundation happiness rests on.

What you destroy in your character you cannot celebrate in your soul.

4. Contradiction Makes Happiness Unsustainable

Happiness is not simply a momentary spike of pleasure — it is the long-range emotional result of living well.

Contradiction sabotages the long range:

• It achieves one thing while harming another

• It solves today by worsening tomorrow

• It relieves discomfort while planting the seeds of greater suffering

This yields only episodic highs, never enduring happiness.

Happiness is the reward for building a life that works.
 Contradiction is the guarantee that it's all going to fall apart.

5. Internal Coherence Is The Essence Of Happiness

To be happy is to feel:

• Integrated

• Grounded

• Clear

• In alignment

• At peace with oneself

• Proud of one’s choices

• Confident in one’s direction

Contradiction violates all of these.

A self at civil war cannot experience joy without interruption and cannot maintain a positive emotional tone over time.

Contradiction is psychological disintegration.
 Happiness is psychological integration.

The two cannot coexist.

✅ K. Happiness Requires Internal Coherence

Happiness cannot be passively received or externally imposed.
It must be earned through:

• Rational coherence (no chronic conscious contradictions)

• Purposeful action (values pursued and achieved)

• Self-esteem (a strong conviction that ones desires are valid and deserve to be experienced)

• Self-valuing (a functioning ego that sees your own life as worth living)

• Integrity (alignment between thought, action, and principle)

Happiness is the psychological expression of mental health.

It's the mind’s ongoing verdict:
“My life is going well. I am living as I should.”

Happiness requires an internal coherence of values and beliefs. 

1. Integrity

Integrity is the virtue of integration that makes long-range happiness possible.
It is the choice to never permit a contradiction between what one believes or knows, what one values, and how one acts.

A person of integrity aligns their beliefs, decisions, and behavior with the facts of reality.
 One without integrity lives in psychological civil war — divided between knowledge and action, truth and pretense, desire and guilt.

Happiness requires the belief that one’s life is good, justified, and non-contradictory.
 But that belief cannot be sustained if ones actions contradict their values, or if their values contradict reality.

• If you preach honesty but manipulate others, your subconscious will flag it as a lie.

• If you claim to value health but quietly destroy yourself, you cannot feel fully proud.

• If you say you love someone but act with indifference or malice, the mind detects the inconsistency.

Because the human mind integrates information automatically, contradictions cannot simply be willed away. They accumulate pressure. The result is a chronic background noise of tension, guilt, discomfort, and emotional fragmentation.

A mind at war with itself cannot reach stable happiness.

2. Cognitive Dissonance: The Emotional Cost Of Contradiction

Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant psychological state produced when one holds two or more contradictory beliefs, values, or actions and remains aware of the conflict on some level.

Dissonance is the signal of implicit contradiction.

When one tries to act on contradictions, several emotional consequences arise:

• Anxiety — “Something doesn’t add up. Something is off.”

• Defensiveness or rationalization — attempts to paper over the clash.

• Low-grade guilt — not necessarily moral guilt, but the sense of internal misalignment.

• Fragmented identity — one “self” that thinks X and another that does Y.

This undermines happiness because there is no unitary self capable of saying:
"My life makes sense. I am whole. I approve of myself."

Happiness requires inner coherence.

When one practices integrity:

• Their values align with reality.

• Their actions align with their values.

• Their emotions align with both.

This creates a single, integrated psychological system — the precondition for joy.

A person of integrity experiences:

• Self-trust

• Self-respect

• Clarity

• Consistency of character

• The absence of guilt or inner fragmentation

All of these form the emotional foundation upon which deep happiness rests.

• Happiness requires the belief that one’s life is good.

• Integrity is what makes that belief possible.

• Contradiction — experienced as cognitive dissonance — destroys that belief.

Happiness is impossible without integrity, because integrity is what makes self-approval realistic.

✅ L. Sovereignty: The Metaphysical Basis of Earned Happiness

Human beings survive by thinking.
Not by reflex, instinct, absorption into a collective, divine revelation, or passive drifting—but by individual judgment, choice, and action.

Sovereignty is the fact that:

• No one can think for you

• No one can evaluate for you

• No one can choose your values for you

• No one can act for you in the deepest meaning

• No one can integrate your life for you

You can outsource labor, but you cannot outsource this most basic survival process and expect to experience a satisfying sensation of competency.

Happiness is an emotional reward for exercising sovereignty, ie. attempting and acting to live a good life.
 It comes from knowing:

“I did this.
 I built this.
 I understood this.
 I chose this.
 I earned this.”

This is why:

• The lottery winner’s “happiness” is unearned and evaporates quickly

• The children who inherit their fortune without effort often lose it, along with their sense of social value 

• The monk in the monastery feels calm but incapable of reaching his full potential

• The escapist drug addict feels pleasure but not pride

• The religious cultist feels faith based certainty but not self empowered clarity

• The spoiled child feels entitled and becomes bratty, unable to understand the concept of work and earning values

• The man driven into a career by family tradition struggles to feel internal strength and contentment 

• The young adults pressured into religion and arranged marriages feel out of control and unworthy of their own life directed authority 

Where sovereignty is bypassed, happiness is next to impossible.
 Because the individual never experiences their own causal efficacy.

✅ M. Happiness Requires Autonomy

Happiness is impossible without autonomy, because autonomy is the precondition for valuing, choosing, acting — and therefore earning the emotional reward of a life one approves of.

To be autonomous is to:

• Select one’s own values

• Direct one’s own actions

• Take responsibility for outcomes

• Experience the causal link between effort and achievement

This causal chain — value → choice → action → success → emotional reward — is what generates genuine happiness. Break any link and the result may still be pleasure, but not happiness.

To live with autonomy is to live in accordance with your nature, as a sovereign entity, as a human who must think and act to survive. 

For there to be deep, self approving happiness, one must hold responsibility for the positive effects they experience. 

1. Why Autonomy Is Essential For Happiness

Happiness is the emotional confirmation:
“My life is good because I made it so.”

This requires:

• A self that chooses

• A mind that evaluates

• An agent that acts

• And a life shaped by one’s own character and decisions

Where these are absent, happiness cannot exist — there's only manipulated or disconnected sensations.

2. Counterfeit Happiness: Pleasure Without Autonomy

Pleasure produced by:

• Coercion (what others force you to value or do)

• Delusion (false beliefs one mistakes for reality)

• Dogma or conditioning (values implanted rather than chosen)

• Escapist fantasy (drug-induced highs, dissociation, simulations)

…is emotionally real in sensation, but psychologically fake in source.

It divorces consciousness from reality — and therefore from the requirements of life.
A drug high, a blissful simulation, or a comforting lie may trigger pleasure, but they cannot produce happiness, because happiness requires perceiving one’s life as true, good, self-directed, and non-contradictory.

If consciousness does not direct action and cannot own the results, the emotional signal cannot say:
“I did this.”

It can only say:
“This feels nice.”
 —that is pleasure, not happiness.

3. Happiness Requires Causal Efficacy

The deepest form of happiness — the long-range emotional tone that underlies a flourishing life — comes from the conviction:

“I am capable. I can shape my world. My choices matter.”

Autonomy is what makes this conviction real.

Without autonomy, one loses:

• Self-trust

• Self-respect

• Personal pride

• The sense of authorship over one’s life

Without these, the psychological basis of happiness collapses.

4. Why Coercion Or Self-Evasion Cannot Produce Happiness

Coercion destroys autonomy externally.
 Self-evasion destroys autonomy internally.

Both produce the same outcome:

• No chosen values → no personal meaning

• No self-directed action → no achievement

• No causal efficacy → no pride

• No integrated identity → no lasting happiness

One becomes a passenger in one’s own life — and passengers cannot be happy, only momentarily soothed.

5. The Necessity Of Conscious Autonomy 

Happiness is the emotional reward of self-directed success.

To the extent that a person’s life is:

• Self-chosen

• Consciously hand picked

• Self-directed

• Reality-oriented

• And non-contradictory

—to that extent they can be happy.

To the extent their life is:

• Dictated

• Delusional

• Evaded

• Or passively drifted into

—to that extent happiness becomes impossible, and only bouts of pleasure remain.

Autonomy is not optional.
 It is the psychological root of genuine happiness.

✅ N. The Cognitive & Emotional Structure of Happiness

Happiness is a unified state produced by two layers working together.

1. Cognitive Layer (Evaluation)

A judgment and approval:
“This aspect of reality supports my values, needs, or life.”

Examples:

• “My work matters.”

• “My relationships are healthy.”

• “My habits support my goals.”

This includes:

• Identifying a value

• Evaluating its relationship to your life

• Approving of the result

• Believing XX is true and good for me

2. Emotional Layer (Response)

The positive feeling that results from that judgment.

This mirrors how most emotions work:

• Fear → evaluating reality as threatening

• Anger → evaluating reality as unjust

• Happiness → evaluating reality as beneficial

Examples:

• Pride

• Joy

• Confidence

• Serenity

• Excitement

• Peaceful contentment

The emotion is the result of the cognition, not the cause.

A person can change their feelings only by changing their judgments and values — not by repressing emotions or “trying to feel good.”

3. Happiness As Approval

Happiness is, at root, an act of approval.

Definition of approval: A positive judgment that something meets your standards.

Definition of disapproval: A negative judgment that something violates your standards.

Why this definition of approval works for every example

✔ General approving a war tactic

He judges the tactic meets his standards for effectiveness.

✔ Lawyer approving a letter

She judges the letter meets her standards for accuracy and legality.

✔ Judge approving a verdict

He judges the verdict meets his standards for justice and evidence.

✔ A man approving a woman’s outfit

He judges the outfit meets his standards of beauty or taste.

✔ Approving the quality of coffee

You judge it meets your standards for flavor or enjoyment.

✔ Approving one’s aesthetic goals

You judge they meet your standards for self-image or progress.

✔ Approving a weapon’s firing rate

You judge it meets your standards for performance.

✔ Approving a puppy’s potty training

You judge the behavior meets your standards for progress.

Why this definition is ideal 

1. It is value-neutral.
    Approval can be technical, moral, aesthetic, practical, emotional, strategic — any domain.

2. It does not force emotion.
    Some approvals are dry and procedural; others are passionate.
   Happiness arises from emotional approval, but approval itself can be unemotional.

3. It centers on “standards,” which is the essence of evaluation.
    All approval is comparing reality to your internal or external standards.

4. It scales from micro to macro, from particular to global.
    Works for approving a single sip of coffee or your whole life.

5. It’s crisp enough to communicate the essence of happiness.
   Because emotional approval is simply approval + an emotional response.

6. It’s fully generalizable across all domains of human judgment.
    Which is accurate to objective reality.

Why approval causes happiness

One cannot be happy about something one disapproves of. One cannot say “I disapprove of being robbed, therefore when I am robbed, I’m happy.”

One can only be happy about what they approve of. “I bought something I wanted and its good, I approve of the means I acquired this value and what it provides for me.”

Approval is the essential cognitive act that makes happiness possible, because every instance of happiness presupposes a judgment:

“This is good for my life.”

Without that judgment—implicit or explicit—there is nothing for the emotion of happiness to attach to. Happiness does not arise from neutrality, confusion, or contradiction. It arises from the mind affirming a positive relationship between reality and one’s values.

Happiness is an act of judgment—specifically, an act of approval—and therefore impossible without standards, discrimination, and the willingness to say “No” to evil, parasitism, and destruction. This recognition vehemently opposes:

• “Non-judgmental” positivity culture

• Mystic acceptance of everything

• The idea that you can be happy while approving of your own destruction

Happiness isn't passive acceptance; it's active discrimination.

4. Non-Judgemental Positivity Is The Enemy Of Happiness: Discrimination Is Essential

Happiness necessarily requires discrimination. 

Modern positivity culture—“accept everything,” “don’t judge,” “everything is love”—undermines the very mechanism that makes happiness possible.

If you refuse to discriminate you cannot:

• Condemn destruction

• Value creation

• Reject crime

• Meaningfully approve of achievement

A person who thinks “everything is good” cannot value anything.
 Approval loses all meaning when it is given out universally.

To approve of everything is to approve of nothing.

Approval is fundamentally selective. It means "this, not that" or "this more than that." When everything receives identical affirmation, you've eliminated the contrast that gives approval its meaning—like pointing at everything simultaneously, which is the same as pointing at nothing.

Examples:

The Restaurant Critic
 A critic who rates every restaurant five stars—from gas station hot dogs to Michelin cuisine—offers meaningless guidance. Their approval conveys no information.

The Teacher's Grading
 If every student receives an A regardless of effort, the grade loses its purpose. Hard work and mediocrity become indistinguishable.

The Parent's Praise
 When "Great job!" follows every action—sharing toys or hitting siblings alike—praise becomes white noise. The child can't learn what's genuinely valued.

The Art Collector
 Someone who finds every piece equally brilliant—from finger paintings to Notre Dame—hasn't developed taste. Their enthusiasm is indistinguishable from indifference.  

Happiness requires evaluation, which requires standards, which requires discrimination.

Discrimination here means:

• Epistemic discrimination (distinguishing true from false)

• Moral discrimination (good from evil)

• Axiological discrimination (value from non or anti-value)

Happiness is not a passive mood that magically “happens” to someone.
It is an achievement—a result of judgment, valuation, and selective approval. This means: happiness is impossible without discrimination.

Happiness arises only when the mind identifies something as:

• True

• Good

• Life-supporting

• Non-contradictory

This is a discriminating process.
 It is the mind actively sorting reality into beneficial vs. harmful, good vs. evil, supportive vs. destructive.

To be happy, you must stand for something, and therefore against something else.

There is no such thing as neutral happiness.

Discrimination is not negativity—
it is the act of the mind choosing reality over fantasy.

A person who refuses to judge cannot be happy, because they cannot genuinely approve of anything.

5. Approval Requires Judgment

To approve is to judge.
 To judge is to compare facts against values.
 Thus, happiness is impossible without values and impossible without judgments.

A person who refuses to judge cannot be happy in the human sense. At best, they can feel momentary animal-level pleasure—sensory stimulation without conceptual evaluation—but they cannot experience the deep, integrated emotional affirmation that constitutes human happiness.

To say, “I am happy,” is to say:

• “I see something as true.”

• “I regard it as good.”

• “I affirm its consistency with my life and values.”

This is why disapproval cannot generate happiness.
If one looks at poverty and disapproves of it, one cannot be “happy” that poverty exists. But if one sees a business lifting people out of poverty by providing them work, they can approve of that causal pattern—and thereby experience happiness in response to it.

6. Happiness Requires A World in Which Approval Makes Sense

To approve of anything is simultaneously to disapprove of its opposite.

To approve of honesty is to disapprove of deceit.
 To approve of productive work is to disapprove of parasitism and theft.
 To approve of life is to disapprove of what destroys it.

A person who “approves of everything” approves of nothing—because they hold no standards. If someone claims to be happy about everything, including evil, suffering, corruption, or destruction, then they are not:

• Judging reality.

• Distinguishing value from disvalue.

• Identifying causal relationships.

• Approving—they are evading.

This is not happiness; it is the dissociative numbness of someone who has abandoned their evaluative faculty. Human happiness requires a discriminating mind, not a passive smile.

It's logically impossible to approve of everything.

To approve of something necessarily means to distinguish it from its opposite or alternative. When you approve of courage, you're distinguishing it from cowardice.

"Approval of everything" would require simultaneously:

• Approving of honesty AND dishonesty

• Approving of courage AND cowardice

• Approving of productivity AND theft

• Approving of murder AND the sanctity of life

But these are contradictions. You cannot genuinely approve of both a thing and its negation. To "approve of everything" isn't just empty—it's incoherent. It's like trying to say "yes" and "no" to the same question at the same time.

So the person who claims to "approve of everything" isn't just holding no standards—they're attempting something logically impossible. They're either:

1. Not actually approving at all (just experiencing sensations without judgment), or

2. Deceiving themselves about what they're doing

The very concept of approval contains within it the necessity of differentiation and exclusion. Without boundaries, "approval" collapses into meaninglessness not because it's diluted, but because it's self-contradictory.

If someone claims to be “happy” while endorsing:

• Self-sacrifice

• Self-negation

• Passivity

• Withdrawal from life

• The destruction of values

• The erasure of the self

…what they experience is not happiness but affective anesthesia—a tranquilized dissociation from reality.

Happiness cannot coexist with the approval of self-destruction.
 A mind that refuses to discriminate is a mind that cannot protect its own life.

One who cannot approve of what’s good for them cannot disapprove of what’s bad for them.

7. Why Human Happiness Requires Rational Approval

Animals do not approve or disapprove—they react.
 Humans must evaluate.

Happiness is what happens when the mind concludes:

“This is reality, and this reality supports my flourishing.”

Every genuine form of happiness—pride, joy, love, serenity, contentment—is the emotional accompaniment of a judgment of approval about something that is true, good, and life-enhancing.

This is why happiness is inseparable from:

• Truth (or the belief of it)

• Goodness (objective relation to one’s flourishing)

• Non-contradiction (integration with all other values)

And why those who refuse to judge, or who try to anesthetize their faculty of judgment—through mysticism, nihilism, collectivism, or drug-induced evasion—cut themselves off from the very mechanism that makes happiness possible.

Happiness is the emotional reward for rational approval.
 Where approval is impossible, happiness is impossible.
 When approval is achieved through coherent judgment, happiness becomes possible and real.

8. The Crucial Element: Backbone

Happiness requires discrimination.
 Because happiness requires approval.
 Because approval requires judgment.
 Because judgment requires values.
 Because values require a self who chooses.

To be happy, you must be willing to say:

• “This is mine.”

• “This matters.”

• “This supports my life.”

• “I approve.”

And simultaneously:

• “That I reject.”

• “That I will not permit.”

• “That is incompatible with my flourishing.”

Happiness calls you to take a position in reality.

Happiness demands a spine.

✅ O. Standards, Judgment, and the Cognitive Prerequisites of Happiness

Happiness is impossible without standards;
Because happiness is the emotional reward for approval, and approval is the result of a judgment, and judgment requires standards—a hierarchy of what you consider good, bad, better, or best.

To approve of something is not a passive or accidental experience. It’s a lengthy process of evaluating values in relation to your standards.

1. What Is a Standard?

Definition Of Standard: An adopted rule that conditions value success & failure.

It is the rule that connects a value to action, judgment, expectation, and ultimately approval or disapproval.

An axiological standard must be:

1. Value-directed: The rule exists to evaluate or realize a value (good, desirable, worth pursuing).

2. Adopted/endorsed by an agent: It’s a rule you hold or accept (volitional element).

3. Operational/measureable: It specifies conditions or criteria that allow judgments (how to tell success from failure).

4. Normative (prescriptive): It guides approval/disapproval and action, not merely describes.

5. Contextual/scale-sensitive: It can be domain-specific (appearance, justice, performance).

6. Reality-bound / rationally obtainable: A good standard should be compatible with facts and possibility (so we can distinguish rational vs. irrational standards).

7. Stable enough to permit repeated judgment: It’s not purely transient or arbitrary if you want repeated approvals over time (macro-particular standards, etc.).

Every value — justice, love, beauty, wealth, strength, competence — requires a standard to function in real life.

Why?

Because a value without a standard is not actionable.
A value only becomes real when you specify the conditions under which you would judge the value as achieved.

In other words:

A standard is an adopted rule that sets the conditions for success or failure in the pursuit of a value.

It is the rule that tells you:

• What qualifies,

• What disqualifies,

• What counts,

• What doesn’t,

• What deserves approval,

• What deserves disapproval.

A standard conditions your judgments.
It functions like a trigger or threshold: when something meets your standard, approval fires; when it violates the standard, disapproval fires.

Standards can be:

• Aesthetic standards:
   Rules for what qualifies as visually or sensorially pleasing.
  Example: “A space counts as beautiful to me when it is clean, decorated, and intentionally arranged.”

• Moral standards:
   Rules for what qualifies as good, virtuous, or permissible behavior.
  Example: “An action is morally acceptable only if it is honest and doesn’t violate others’ rights.”

• Practical/Functional standards:
   Rules for what qualifies as effective, reliable, or well-made.
  Example: “A tool must operate consistently and safely to count as good.”

• Personal standards (self-evaluative):
   Rules for what counts as self-respect, competence, or personal success.
  Example: “I meet my fitness standard when I train consistently and maintain strength appropriate to my goals.”

• Relational standards:
   Rules for what qualifies as a healthy or rewarding interaction with others.
  Example: “A friend meets my relational standard when they show respect, loyalty, and reliability.”

A standard is a cognitive benchmark.
 It is the rule by which you discriminate:

• Good from bad

• Better from worse

• Success from failure

This ability to discriminate is what makes human happiness human.

A standard is therefore the bridge between values and happiness — it is the rule that conditions when approval is triggered.

If your standards are irrational, impossible, contradictory, or externally dictated, you cannot approve of your actions or your life, no matter how hard you try.

Without standards:

• There is no basis for judgment

• Without judgment, no approval, no happiness

A person with irrational standards lives in chronic failure — because approval becomes impossible.

A person with rational standards lives in an upward spiral — because approval becomes reachable, meaningful, and repeatable.

2. Unrealistic Standards = Guaranteed Unhappiness: Examples

Many people sincerely value good things — strength, beauty, wealth, competence, intelligence —
but sabotage themselves because their standard is detached from reality.

Their un-objective standards become the choke point which prevents them from realizing their success.

Here are some examples:

The Bodybuilder With Impossible Standards

• Value: Physical aesthetics

• Standard: “I must be the biggest, most muscular man on earth.”

• Constraint: Refuses steroids, has average genetics

What the standard does:

• Sets the conditions for self-approval.

• Determines when self-esteem is allowed.

• Blocks happiness if the standard is impossible.

Result:
 They may train hard, get leaner, add muscle, improve health…
 but psychologically, they cannot approve of any progress.

Why?
Because their standard is physically impossible.
And if the standard cannot be met, approval cannot occur.

Without approval, happiness in that domain becomes logically blocked.

This person’s problem is not their values — it’s their standard.

The Woman With the “Most Beautiful in the World” Standard

• Value: Beauty, elegance, self-care

• Standard: “I must be the most beautiful woman alive.”

No matter how much she improves:

• She will resent other women

• She will never be happy with her appearance

Again, the problem is not valuing beauty — the problem is an impossible benchmark.

The Aspiring Billionaire With a Self-Defeating Standard

• Value: Wealth

• Standard: “I must be the richest man alive or I’m a failure.”

He may:

• Start a business

• Make a fortune

…but psychologically, he experiences zero accomplishment.

Why?
 Because he designed a standard with only one possible winner on Earth — and they aren’t him.

He can aim for extreme wealth if he chooses.
 But if his happiness depends on reaching it, and only then, he has destroyed his ability to approve of progress.

Lets adjust the standard.

Standard: “$100k per week.”

What the standard does:

• Sets the threshold for financial success.

• Determines when approval is permitted.

• Conditions satisfaction.

If he earns $50k/week, but his standard is $100k/week, then he cannot approve of himself yet — not because he failed, but because he created a miscalibrated standard.

Standards can be:

• Objective (reasonable progress, measurable improvement), or

• Self-sabotaging (unattainable thresholds that block approval).

A bad standard becomes a happiness veto.

The goal of 100k/week is valid, but as a standard for approval and thus happiness, is not.

The Teen Who Bases Self-Esteem On Universal Approval

• Value: Belonging and connection

• Standard: “Everyone at school must like me.”

It’s not realistic.
 No matter how kind, talented, or charismatic they are, someone will dislike them.

Thus:

• No friendship feels real

• No compliment lands

• Criticism destroys them

They cannot approve of themselves because their standard is externally controlled and universally impossible.

Romantic Standards: Attractiveness, Character, Compatibility

Value: Love, romance, partnership.
Standards: Kindness, intelligence, attractiveness, loyalty, shared worldview.

What the standards do:

• Define what counts as a good partner.

• Determine who qualifies for long-term investment.

• Condition romantic approval.

• Filter out what is unworthy of your values.

Example:
 A man values love and companionship.
His standard might be: “Someone who is physically attractive and intelligent.”

If a woman is ugly and unintelligent, she fails to meet his standard — not because he is cruel, but because:

• His value demands certain qualities,

• His standard defines the minimum conditions for that value to exist,

• And approval only activates when the conditions are met.

Standards determine what you will or will not love.

The Courtroom: Standards of Justice

Values: Peace, truth, fairness, protection of rights.
Standards: Rules of evidence, legal codes, precedents, burden of proof, due process, justice (as the virtue)

A judge cannot deliver a verdict without standards.

If the judge has no standards, what would he judge a case by or against?

How could he determine whether a car thief should be locked up or given a gift hamper?

What the standards do:

• Operationalize the value. (“Peace” becomes actionable through just rules.)

• Determine when certainty beyond reasonable doubt has been achieved.

• Guide action toward that value. (How a judge must think, be unbiased, what evidence is admissible.)

• Set thresholds for approval/disapproval.

Example:

• Value: Peace

• Standard: “Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

• Approval condition: “The evidence meets this threshold.”

• Disapproval condition: “The evidence does not meet this threshold.”

Without such standards, justice collapses into whim.

When it comes to you:

• Your mind is the judge

• Your standards are the law

• Your evaluations are the verdicts

• Your emotions are the sentences

If your internal “law code” is irrational, happiness becomes legally impossible and you’ll sentence yourself to a life of incoherent suffering.

Moral Standards

Value: Moral perfection, righteousness, goodness
Standards: Rationality, honesty, justice, integrity, courage, productivity, respect for rights.

What the standards do:

• Turn morality into specific, repeatable actions.

• Serve as conditional rules for moral appraisal.

• Determine when moral approval (pride) is earned.

If one’s moral standard is “save everyone in the world,” they will never feel moral pride.
 If one’s moral standard is “never judge anything,” they will never feel pride either — because pride requires achievement measured against a real standard.

Without understanding morality and proper standards, one could adopt a mindset of being a “guilty sinner” or of “necessary evil.”

They could inappropriately:

• Punish themselves when they have done no wrong

• Praise themselves when being immoral

3. Rational Standards = The Foundation of Sustainable Happiness

Rational standards are:

• Achievable

• Proportional

• Values-consistent

• Reality-based

• Under your control

• Derived from clear principles

Across all domains:

A standard is the adopted rule that sets the specific conditions under which a value is considered achieved, and therefore worthy of approval.

It functions as:

• A measurement tool

• A qualifier

• A gatekeeper

• A guide to action

• A trigger for approval/disapproval

• A condition for happiness

Values tell you what you want. (love, justice, efficiency, wealth, health)
Standards tell you when you’ve succeeded.

Without a standard, you cannot know whether you’ve achieved a value.
With an irrational standard, you cannot approve of your achievements.
Without approval, you cannot feel happiness.

The chain is airtight:

Value → Standard → Judgment → Approval/Disapproval → Happiness/Suffering

Block or distort any link, and the happiness mechanism breaks.

Examples:

✔ Body / Fitness

• Rational: “I want to build a strong, lean, healthy physique and improve year over year.”

• Irrational: “I must be the biggest human alive.”

✔ Beauty / Aesthetics

• Rational: “I want to be the best-looking version of myself.”

• Irrational: “I must be the most beautiful person on earth.”

✔ Wealth / Success

• Rational: “I want to be able to buy everything I want.”

• Irrational: “I must surpass every human on earth or I am a failure.”

✔ Self-Esteem

• Rational: “My self-esteem comes from my character and actions.”

• Irrational: “Everyone must admire me.”

When standards are rational:

• Success is attainable

• Effort is meaningful

• Progress is rewarding

• Approval is possible

• Happiness becomes a natural byproduct

When standards are irrational:

• Success is next to impossible

• Effort feels futile

• Progress feels invisible

• Approval becomes unreachable

• Happiness is incompatible with the person’s worldview

A person without standards lives like an animal:

• Reacting instead of evaluating

• Floating by whim without guiding principles

• Experiencing pleasure but not happiness

• Feeling sensations but not meaning

• Drifting moment to moment without the ability to say “This is good for me.”

Animals have sensations.
Humans can have happiness.
The difference is judgment, and judgment depends on standards.

5. Standards, Values, Judgment, and Happiness — How They Interlock

The Cognitive Chain Behind Happiness Is:

1. Values — what you want and need

2. Standards — what counts as success

3. Judgment — comparing reality to your standards

4. Approval — the positive judgment

5. Happiness — the emotional reward

Break the chain at any point and approval becomes impossible.

Happiness does not fall from the sky.
It is the end result of a long cognitive process, a multi-layered chain that takes years to construct:

1. Form values
    (“Strength matters to me.” “Honesty matters.”)

2. Build standards
    (“Strong means this.” “Honest means that.”)

3. Discriminate and judge
    (“This meets my standard; this violates it.”)

4. Approve or disapprove
    (“Yes, this is good.” / “No, this is bad.”)

5. Feel the corresponding emotion
    Approval → happiness
    Disapproval → unhappiness

Happiness is step 5, not step 1.

It is the emotional output of a vast inner factory:

• Concepts

• Values

• Standards

• Judgments

• Discriminations

• Integrations

No factory, no product.
 No standards, no approval.
 No approval, no happiness.

If you want happiness:

• Choose objective values according to your priorities

• Set standards aligned with reality and your capacities

• Judge honestly with absolute candour

• Approve where approval is accurate, appropriate and beneficial

• Allow happiness to follow as the natural reward

Rational values require rational standards.
 Rational standards make judgment fair.
 Fair judgment permits approval.

Irrational standards and inept approval sabotage the entire system.

Rational standards and apt approval make happiness a coherent possibility.

6. Happiness Is the Reward for a Life Built with Standards

A child, a nihilist, or a chronically confused person all struggle with happiness for the same reason:
their standards are weak, undefined, or contradictory.

If you can’t say:

• “This is good,”

• “This is meaningful,”

• “This meets my standards,”

…then your emotional life has nothing to reward.

Happiness does not precede a value system.
It depends on one.

To feel sustained happiness is to live a life where:

• Your standards are clear

• Your judgments are accurate

• Your values are chosen rationally

• Your actions align with your evaluations (integrity)

Happiness is the emotional proof that your standards are being met in reality.

It is not mysterious.
 It is earned.

Just as a car does not appear without the construction of an entire factory,
happiness does not appear without the construction of an entire mental framework.

Build the standards → make the judgments → approve of the results → feel the happiness.

This is how a human being creates the conditions for a flourishing emotional life.

✅ P. Love, Honesty, and the Emotional Power Behind Happiness

Approval alone can generate happiness — but love magnifies it.
 Love is what turns approval from a quiet “yes” into a powerful emotional force.

Love is the passionate, intimate appreciation of a value.
It is approval elevated to its highest intensity — when a value becomes not merely “good,” but personally precious, deeply connected to your identity, your worldview, and your experience of life.

1. What Love Is

Love is the emotional expression of a profound judgment:
“This value is not only good — it is life-enriching, meaning-giving, and personally important.”

Love involves:

• Understanding what the value is

• Appreciating its importance

• Wanting it to flourish

• Wanting to protect it from harm

• Recognizing it as something that makes the world worth living in

Love is what you feel toward:

• A person whose character you admire

• A work of art that speaks to your soul

• A philosophy that clarifies your mind

• A food or craft you cherish

• A principle like justice or honesty

• A body or life you’ve worked hard to build

Love is intense approval + deep understanding + personal significance.

It’s the intimate understanding and appreciation of a value, from a sandwhich to a parent.

Love acts to energise and intensify that which you approve of, producing greater and deeper feelings of happines.

When you truly love something, you wish to defend it and you’ll fight for its continued existence.

Love is the experience of connecting to something you cherish, good food, good company, good rules in a society.

2. Love as the Energy Source of Happiness

Approval produces happiness.
But love amplifies happiness — it adds emotional intensity, energy, vitality, and warmth.

Love is the spark that ignites happiness into something vivid and memorable.

Why?

Because love is:

• Focused

• Selective

• Meaningful

• Deeply integrated with your identity

• Reinforced by years of learning, experience, and judgment

Approval is the cognitive “yes.”
 Love is the passionate “YES — and it matters.”

Happiness requires approval.
Powerful happiness requires love.

3. Love Requires Standards (and Therefore Judgment and Discrimination)

To love anything — a person, a craft, a principle, a moment — you must have standards.

A standard is:
A criterion for what you judge as good and worthy.

Without standards:

• You cannot judge

• Without judgment you cannot approve

• Without approval you cannot love

• Without love you cannot experience deep happiness

Love is discrimination:

• To love kindness is to reject cruelty

• To love romance is to reject betrayal

• To love excellence is to reject mediocrity

• To love beauty is to reject ugliness

Loving something inherently implies not loving its opposite.

Meaning requires difference. Value requires contrast.
 Love requires standards.

4. Love Requires Honesty

A person can only love properly if they are honest — primarily honest with themselves.

Honesty here means:

• Identifying what you truly value

• Admitting what you actually admire

• Acknowledging what enriches your life

• Refusing to fake approval for things you don’t respect

• Refusing to pretend to love what harms or diminishes you

If you lie about your values, your standards collapse.
 If your standards collapse, your approval becomes arbitrary (incoherent, whimsical and senseless).
If your approval becomes arbitrary, your love becomes impossible — and so does happiness.

This is why indiscriminate love is psychologically empty:

• “Loving everyone equally” is the same as loving no one in particular.

• If your standards apply to everything, they apply to nothing.

• Love without discrimination is not love — it’s the absence of evaluation.

Real love requires honest judgment of real virtues, not blanket sentiment with no cognitive content.

5. The Cognitive Structure Behind Love → Approval → Happiness

Love sits at the top of the evaluative hierarchy.
 The chain looks like this:

1. Values
    (What you consider important.)

2. Standards
    (The criteria you use to judge values.)

3. Judgments
    (Comparing reality to your standards.)

4. Approval
    (Positive judgment: “This meets my standards.”)

5. Love
    (“Not only does this meet my standards — it fulfills them in a deeply meaningful way.”)

6. Happiness
    (The emotional reward for approval, intensified by love.)

Happiness is the result.
Love is the fuel that makes that result powerful.

6. Happiness Requires Honest Love of Your True Values

You can only be deeply happy if:

• You love what is genuinely good for you

• You reject what violates your standards

• You commit emotionally to your values

• Your love reflects truth and internal coherence

Happiness requires the belief:
“I am loving what is true, good, and non-contradictory.”

One who loves dishonestly cannot be happy.
 One who refuses to judge cannot be happy.
 One with no standards cannot be happy.

But one who:

• Judges honestly,

• Approves selectively

• Loves passionately and with integrity—

…builds the psychological foundation for the deepest possible happiness.

Love is the emotional engine of a flourishing mind.
 It is how approval becomes joy.
 It is how values become meaning.
 It is how life becomes not just worth living, but a joy to live.

✅ Q. Happiness Requires Caring About Your Values

Happiness is the flashing neon sign of a life oriented toward objective values. But objective values cannot enhance your life unless you care about them. Caring is the bridge between value-in-reality and value-in-consciousness.

To care is to treat something as mattering — as significant to your existence, your flourishing, and your identity. Without caring, values cannot function psychologically. One who refuses to care about their values cannot experience genuine happiness, because happiness is the emotional approval of the good, and approval is impossible when nothing is regarded as good (or everything is).

You cannot be happy about what you do not value, and you cannot value what you refuse to care about.

1. Happiness Presupposes Caring About What Is Good

For a rational, concept-using organism (humans), happiness requires an active orientation toward the objective values that sustain flourishing:

• Freedom and autonomy

• Knowledge and truth

• Health and wellbeing 

• Relationships and love

• Wealth and productivity

• Creativity and achievement

• Inner harmony and peace

The 7 domains are objectively valuable because they support biological and psychological flourishing, whether or not one currently pursues them. But the experience of happiness depends on recognizing their value and caring about them.

One who does not care about:

• Health cannot be happy to be healthy.

• Freedom cannot rejoice in being free.

• Knowledge cannot experience the joy of learning.

• Relationships cannot feel love.

Happiness requires caring because caring is how the mind identifies, evaluates, and emotionally invests in objective values.

2. Caring Is Not Clinging — It Is Commitment To Flourishing

A common evasion in Stoicism, Buddhism, and certain mystical traditions is the claim that suffering comes from caring, so the solution is to extinguish desire, detach from values, and numb attachment.

This is backwards.

The problem is not caring —
 the problem is caring irrationally about the wrong things.

The Stoic/Buddhist solution is to suppress caring, treating it as a threat to serenity. But this destroys the mechanism of happiness, because caring is how we:

• Identify what matters.

• Mobilize effort and action.

• Achieve values.

• Experience emotional reward.

Detachment does not protect happiness —
it prevents happiness.

If you find nothing upsetting, how could you find anything uplifting?

If nothing matters, nothing can make you happy.

A monk who “does not care” about health, wealth, relationships, achievement, or freedom has also forfeited the possibility of approving of them. Their “peace” is merely the absence of striving — a static, animal-like equilibrium, not the flourishing of man qua man, man living in the capacity of his full potential.

The absence of suffering does not insinuate the presence of anything valuable.

Creating a good life is not simply the absence of destruction, just like you can’t build a house by refraining from demolishing one.

Happiness is achieved by addition, not subtraction.

It is presence of the good, not only the absence of bad.

To be happy requires you to care about the values you have, materially, emotionally and intellectually. To care about a value requires identification and protection.

If you refuse to identify as one who cares about knowledge and freedom, you will never strive to become knowledgeable and free and thus never experience the value of wisdom or peace.

How can one cherish anything if they don’t identify a value as good to them and consider it worth protecting?

You cannot experience the joy of achieving values you refuse to pursue.
You cannot experience pride in virtues you refuse to commit to.
You cannot experience love for people you refuse to regard as important.

You cannot feel happiness if all you do is cut and cut and cut away everything you’re afraid to lose.

This is not strength. This is the sign of one who is terrified to live.

3. Caring Across The Whole Value Cycle

For humans, caring is not a single momentary feeling; it spans the entire arc of valuation:

1. Caring Enough to Choose Objective Values

You must judge what is worth pursuing — using reason, life experience, and conceptual clarity.
If you don’t care enough to judge, you cannot distinguish the valuable from the destructive.

2. Caring Enough to Pursue Them

Values are not automatically realized; they exist in potential until actualized.
Happiness requires the self-generated effort of trying, failing, learning, adapting, and striving.

3. Caring Enough to Attain Them

Achievement requires the willingness to endure discomfort, difficulty, and delay.
 If you do not care enough to endure challenges, your dreams remain dreams.

4. Caring Enough to Protect Them

Every real value can be threatened — by entropy, negligence, vice, parasitism, or malice.
If one does not care enough to defend one’s values, one does not truly value them.

5. Caring Enough to Keep Growing

Happiness requires long-range flourishing.
This means caring about continued improvement, refinement, and self-expansion.

Without caring along this entire chain, happiness cannot be sustained.
One who refuses to care will not build anything worth approving — therefore cannot experience true happiness.

4. Why Indifference Cannot Produce Happiness

Indifference is not serenity.
It is psychological atrophy.

One who “doesn’t care” about their health, wealth, relationships, freedom, or purpose is not peaceful — they are drifting, numb, and detached from the objective conditions of their flourishing.

Happiness is the approval of one’s life.
Approval requires values.
Values require caring.

Thus indifference is the negation of happiness.

Likewise:

• A stoic who “accepts everything” cannot meaningfully approve of anything.

• A Buddhist who dissolves desire dissolves the possibility of joy.

• A nihilist who claims nothing matters can never experience happiness, only distraction or relief.

Without caring, the evaluative mechanism of consciousness collapses, and with it the possibility of happiness.

How could turning a blind eye away from everything which matters produce happiness?

How could indifference to justice or evil alike make you feel good about yourself?

How could burying your head in the sand and refusing to acknowledge the reality of life generate any kind of genuine positivity?

It can’t.

5. Happiness Requires That You Stand for Something

Happiness is not passive well-being.
 It is the emotional reward for having:

• Chosen the right values,

• Cared enough to pursue them,

• And succeeded enough to approve of your life.

Happiness requires that you take sides:

• For health, against decay

• For wealth, against poverty

• For knowledge, against ignorance

• For love, against isolation

• For freedom, against tyranny

• For virtue, against vice

• For flourishing, against stagnation

A value-neutral or “above good and evil” perspective cannot generate happiness, because happiness is the emotional affirmation of the good.

A belief that there is no good or evil, that there is no right or wrong, is secretly the wish for life to be easier, so one does not have to exert the effort of thinking, judging and choosing a side.

A life without caring, striving, and defending is a life without values.
 A life without values is a mind without happiness.

✅ R. Why Children & Animals Cannot Experience Happiness

Happiness presupposes approval, and approval presupposes judgment. One cannot be happy about nothing or about everything indiscriminately. To approve of something is to judge that it is true, good, and life-supporting; to disapprove of something else is to judge that it is false, harmful, or destructive. Happiness is therefore not a random mood but an earned emotional response to reality as rationally evaluated.

It’s the mental evaluation of feelings connected to values.

1. Animals Cannot Experience Happiness — Only Biological Pleasure Or Distress

Animals may look “happy” when released from confinement or when playing, but this is:

• Not happiness

• Not approval

• Not evaluative

• Not conceptual

• Not tied to purpose or meaning

An animal cannot judge:

• “This environment supports my life.”

• “Running free is good.”

• “Confinement is bad.”

• “This aligns with my values.”

Animals lack:

• Concept-formation

• Volitional rationality

• Value-hierarchies

• Long-range thinking

• Explicit approval/disapproval

• A worldview

They have feelings, but cannot experience happiness.

Pleasure and pain in animals are biological signals, not conceptual appraisals.

2. Why A Caged Animal Looks “Unhappy” But Still Isn’t Experiencing Human Unhappiness

A caged dog pacing looks “unhappy,” but what is happening?

Not:

“My life lacks meaning.”
 “I disapprove of the conditions of my existence.”
 “This contradicts my long-range goals.”

Instead:

• Restricted movement → nervous-system alarm signals

• Chronic stress → negative feeling

• Boredom → lack of stimulation → agitation

It’s biological discomfort, not existential despair.

Likewise, freedom produces:

• Sensory stimulation

• Social contact

• Physical satisfaction

• Relief of stress

All feeling only states, not happiness.

3. Animals Experience Feelings

Animals undeniably display positive feelings—a dog wagging its tail, a cat purring, a dolphin playing. But these states, however pleasant or endearing, are not happiness in the human sense. They lack the essential cognitive components that make happiness a conceptual, evaluative, life-integrating emotion.

To grasp the distinction, we must separate:

• Feelings (felt biological responses)

• Emotions (conceptual appraisal of feelings)

• Consciousness (perceptual vs. conceptual)

• Ego (the enduring sense of self across time)

• Judgment (the root of approval—impossible without abstract concepts)

4. Feelings Vs. Emotions: The Real Difference Between Animals, Children, and Adults

All aware organisms experience feelings—raw, immediate, biological states such as:

• Pleasure

• Pain

• Warmth

• Fear

• Anxiety

• Comfort

• Calm

• Excitement

These are felt experiences, not interpretations.
 Animals, infants, and adults all have these states. They are the basic “what it’s like” of being alive.

But only cognitively mature humans can turn feelings into emotions—that is:

• Evaluations

• Meaning

• Interpretation

• Integration over time

• Judgments about values and life

A feeling is:
“This hurts.”
 An emotion is:
“This pain threatens something I care about.”

A feeling is:
“I’m scared.”
 An emotion is:
“My future is in danger; this matters to my life.”

This distinction explains the psychological gap between animals and humans, and why only humans can truly experience happiness in the philosophical sense.

5. Animals, Children, Adults: Feelings & Emotions

Animals: Feeling Only

Animals have the same kinds of felt states we do—fear, comfort, excitement, pain—but these states never become conceptual emotions.

• Fear → Hiding or fleeing

• Pleasure → Approaching food or social contact

• Pain → Withdrawing

• Warmth and safety → Relaxing

An animal does not think:

• “I am safe overall.”

• “My life is good.”

• “This event fits my long-term values.”

It simply feels and reacts.

This is why an animal can:

• Wag its tail in one moment

• Attack the next

• Relax shortly after

There is no long-range interpretation behind the shifts.
Its states are immediate, fluctuating, and unintegrated.

Animals have feelings, not emotions in the conceptual, value-based sense.

Children: Feelings + Rudimentary Evaluation = Proto Emotions

Young children have feelings just like animals—but they begin to add simple meanings.

Example:

• “My toy broke → this is bad.”

• “Mom praised me → this is good.”

These are still short-range and concrete, but they are one step above animals.

Children can connect:

• Feeling → Simple reason

But they cannot yet integrate feelings into:

• Long-range identity

• Abstract principles

• A view of their life as a whole

They have feelings, plus early proto-emotions, but not the full conceptual emotions of an adult.

Adults: Feelings + Meaning = Emotions (and Happiness)

Adults experience the same raw feelings animals and children do, but add:

• Conceptual judgment

• Values

• Self-reflection

• Long-term integration

• Moral and personal meaning

A raw feeling becomes an emotion when interpreted through values.

Examples

Feeling: Anxiety
Emotion: “This threat endangers something I value.”

Feeling: Joy
Emotion: “I achieved a meaningful goal.”

Feeling: Anger
Emotion: “A principle I care about was violated.”

Feeling: Warmth or excitement
Emotion: “My relationship or career is growing in a direction that fulfills my values.”

This ability to turn immediate feelings into evaluations of life and values is uniquely human.

Humans can feel pleasure when they learn how to change a tyre, BECAUSE it means they won’t ever be stuck on the side of the road waiting for someone else to save them in such an easily fixable situation. The ability to turn that feeling into a recognizable value is what makes one experience the emotion of happiness.

The power to say because is what is uniquely special to adult humans.

Tax is a violation of rights because it is theft masquerading as civic duty. Because a grown man or woman has the ability to integrate these concepts into a rational, conscious perspective, they can form the emotion of righteous anger.

Because humans can think, they have the faculty of conceptual thought. They don’t feel unsafe and simply bark at a perceived danger, they can unify and respond to an existential, long range threat.

This is only possible because humans can experience emotions.

Without emotions, humans become like sheep, experiencing the feeling of fear, but not knowing what to do about it.

With emotions, humans have the capacity to overthrow the sheppard and pursue a rational, happy life.

6. Animals Are Aware, But Not Conscious In The Human Sense

Animals possess perceptual awareness, not conceptual consciousness.

They can:

• See

• Hear

• Smell

• Recognize patterns

• Remember specific associations

• Navigate environments

But they cannot:

• Form abstract concepts

• Understand principles

• Integrate present, past, and future

• Evaluate their life as a whole

• Judge reality

• Hold values as concepts

• Choose long-range goals

They do not ask:

• “Am I living well?”

• “Is this life worthy of me?”

• “Am I proud of my actions?”

• “Is my future secure?”

These questions require conceptual consciousness, which only humans have.

Therefore, they can never be happy, because they do not possess the mental equipment to conceptualise happiness as an identifiable emotion.

7. Happiness Requires An Ego—Animals Don’t Have One

An ego is the awareness of one’s self as an enduring identity across time:

• “I am the same person today as yesterday.”

• “My choices shape my future.”

• “My life has a trajectory.”

This is a conceptual continuity of identity.

Animals lack this.

Their awareness is episodic and present-anchored, not self-integrated across time.

A dog remembers events, but not himself as a unified entity that persists through those events. He does not think:

“That was me as a puppy, and this is me now. Someday I'll grow old, die and go to doggy heaven.”

Self-continuity is a conceptual complex, not a biological reflex.

Without ego, there is no:

• Personal pride

• Personal shame

• Ambition

• Integrity

• Self-esteem

• Life-assessment

• Long-range planning

• Value hierarchy

Thus animals cannot experience happiness, only pleasant feelings.

8. Happiness Requires Judgment—Animals Cannot Judge

Judgment is conceptual:

• To approve of X, one must identify X.

• To identify X, one must conceptualize it.

• To conceptualize it, one must think abstractly.

Animals can neither:

• Conceptualize a situation (“This is a value”)

• Integrate it (“This supports my life”)

• Judge it (“This is good for me”)

• Approve of it (“I embrace this reality”)

Therefore animals cannot approve of reality.
And without approval, happiness is impossible.

This is also why animals do not have morality or rights, because they cannot objectively judge right and wrong.

9. Children Cannot Experience Adult Happiness

A child can feel joy, excitement, comfort, safety, pride in small accomplishments — but these are semi-conceptual emotional spikes, not mature, rational happiness.

Why?

• They lack the life experience needed to form stable, long-range values.

• Their conceptual faculty is still developing; abstraction is limited.

• They have not yet formed a coherent worldview about what they approve or disapprove of.

• Their judgments are shallow, unstable, and often contradictory — which is why their moods swing wildly.

A child’s emotional life is reactive, not evaluative.
They feel good or bad from moment to moment without a stable hierarchy of values to unify their inner life.

Thus, they cannot experience full adult happiness, only proto-happiness—early forms of approval and pride as their rational faculty emerges.

Animals lack the faculty entirely, not merely its development.

Full adult happiness requires:

• A conceptual understanding of one’s values

• Long-range integration

• Self-directed action

• A worldview

• The capacity to judge reality as a whole

These prerequisites do not meaningfully exist until adolescence and often not until well into adulthood.

Thus, children experience pleasure, joy, comfort, excitement — but not happiness as a philosophical-emotional state.

10. Adult Human Happiness Requires Conceptual Judgment

True happiness emerges only when one can say:

• “I approve of the direction of my life.”

• “My values are coherent and moving forward.”

• “Reality is intelligible and benevolent to my efforts.”

• “My choices and actions are working.”

These require:

• Rationality (concepts, integration, non-contradiction)

• Experience (enough data to form stable values)

• Self-awareness (knowledge of one’s nature and capacities)

• Long-range thinking (the ability to project into the future)

• Self-directed action (so that the results are one’s own)

Without these, one can have animalistic pleasure, excitement, or relief — but not happiness.

Happiness is not mere feeling, it is a conceptual achievement possible due to our psychology of being human.

Happiness is what you judge your life to be.

Happiness is a philosophical and psychological state, not an unthinking biological reflex.

11. Why This Matters For Happiness

This distinction is essential to show:

• Why animals cannot be happy but can feel good

• Why children cannot yet experience full happiness, they feel good or bad for simple reasons.

• Why pseudo-happiness (mystical “bliss,” drug highs, detachment philosophies) collapses humans back to infancy and even animacy, divorcing emotion from judgment

• Why happiness is a conceptual achievement, not an animal-level sensation

Happiness, in the philosophical sense, is:

The long-range emotional approval of one’s life as a whole.

This requires:

• Memory

• Abstraction

• Identity

• Values

• Time-projection

• Self-concept

• Judgment

Animals do not possess these capacities and young children don’t yet.

The less one thinks, the more they refuse to judge, the less they approve, care and value, the less “human” one becomes, morally and functionally. 

To live as an adult human and to experience the gamut of conceptual happiness, one must exercise the full capacity of their innate intelligence.

✅ S. Happiness As A Long-Range Emotional State

Human consciousness is inherently time-bound. Unlike animals, we grasp the past, present, and future as a unified continuum. Because of this, happiness cannot be merely a feeling “in the moment.”
It is the emotional response to a life as a whole moving in the right direction.

1. Why Happiness Cannot Be “In The Now” Only

You cannot feel genuinely happy in the present if the future is known to be collapsing toward you.

• If your finances are about to implode

• If your relationships are on the brink of disaster

• If your health is deteriorating and you refuse to act

• If your principles contradict each other and you know you will pay for it later

—your mind cannot seal that knowledge off. Human consciousness integrates across time. We evaluate not just what is, but what will be.

One can feel temporary pleasure despite a doomed trajectory, but not happiness, because happiness implicitly integrates the long-range consequences of one’s choices.

2. Human Happiness Requires Long-Range Causality

Man is a conceptual, volitional, future-oriented being.
 To live as such, one must:

• Plan

• Build

• Choose values

• Pursue long-range goals

• Integrate consequences

• Coordinate present actions with future outcomes

You cannot be happy if your life is directionless.
 You cannot be happy if your future contradicts your values.
 You cannot be happy if your survival depends on evading responsibility for your own life.
 You cannot be happy if you outsource your needs and agency and call it “transcendence.”

You can feel serenity, calm, or relief—but happiness requires far more.

3. The Long-Range Standard

Humans survive through planning, production, foresight, and self-direction.
We are beings of long-term projects—building careers, relationships, health, knowledge, and character across decades.

It arises from:

• Building a life that will continue to function

• Confidence in the continuity of one’s life.

• Knowing your future is worth facing

• A rational belief that one’s future is worth wanting, not something to be feared or evaded.

• Seeing long-term consequences align with your values

• Integrating your past achievements, present actions, and future prospects

• Happiness is an emotional reward not just for today’s values, but for the trajectory of one’s existence.

It is a temporal integration, not a momentary sensation.

4. Why “Present-Moment Happiness” Fails

Some traditions (various forms of Buddhism, Taoism, “just be” teachings, Eckhart Tolle–style mindfulness, etc.) attempt to achieve emotional peace by suspending future-oriented thinking, encouraging people to focus entirely on the present moment.

This can produce:

• Calm

• Relief from anxiety

• A reduction in mental chatter

But it does so by narrowing consciousness, not integrating it.

It treats the future as a threat rather than a field of action.

Presence and meditation as a practice can be highly beneficial. But as a way of life, can be highly detrimental. The difference in application is enormous.

Such approaches accepted as a full time principle can create a psychological experience that resembles happiness—light, soothing, peaceful—but it is fundamentally short-range, because:

1. It depends on disengagement, not achievement.

2. It doesn’t solve long-term problems, only removes them from conscious focus.

3. It divorces emotion from reality, requiring people to bracket off the parts of life they cannot control or cope with.

4. It forfeits agency, replacing self-direction with passive acceptance.

This is not the happiness of a functioning human life.
It is closer to emotional sedation—relief rather than fulfillment.

The fallacy of "present only happiness" collapses the entire structure of human life:

• A human cannot live as an animal, confined to the present with no thought of consequences.

• A human must produce food, shelter, technology, knowledge, and values. These require time, discipline, and purpose.

• Evading the future does not create happiness—it creates parasitic dependency on the people who do think and create.

To live only in the present is to surrender the uniquely human capacity for self-directed life.
 You stop planning, building, improving, and projecting your life across time. You instead drift passively and become dependent on others to support your existence.

Such “happiness” is not the human mode of happiness.
It is short-range, unearned, and fragile—a pleasant feeling disconnected from life as a volitional, conceptual being.

5. The Danger Of “Go With the Flow” Philosophies

Movements like Taoism, Zen-influenced “present-moment” doctrines, and modern New-Age passivity often treat happiness as a state of non-effort — a surrender of agency, a drifting with circumstance rather than directing one’s course. But for a rational, volitional being, this cannot serve as a philosophy of life.

“Going with the flow” may have a context-specific use — for example, relaxing control in situations where control is impossible or unnecessary — but as a guiding maxim, it disconnects the essentials of human virtue from values:

• It abandons responsibility, because one who refuses to choose cannot be accountable for outcomes.

• It undermines agency, because one ceases to treat life as something to shape, manage, and improve.

• It erodes self-esteem, because self-worth depends on exercising one’s efficacy — the conviction “I can choose, act, and achieve.”

A passive life may feel temporarily soothing, but long-term it generates impotence, stagnation, and fragmentation. Humans are not organisms designed to be carried by the current; we are beings who must steer. Happiness is the emotional reward for successfully living a life one has chosen, built, and earned — not a life surrendered to drift.

“Flow” can be appropriate in specific moments; it is disastrous as a worldview. A human life requires direction, long-range planning, and the pride of authorship — the exact traits passive doctrines ask us to abandon. The result is not happiness but a chronic sense of incompleteness: the feeling of a life unclaimed.

A life of ‘going with the flow’ is a life someone else is steering. That is not happiness — that is learned helplessness.

6. The Senseless Nature Of “Non-Dual” Mysticism

Mystical claims that “everything is one,” “there is no good or bad,” “drop judgment entirely”, "don't think, just feel," "the past and future don't exist, there is only now," demand the abolition of the very faculty that makes happiness possible:

Reason.

If you remove:

• Identity

• Value

• Judgment

• Distinction

• Self

• Purpose

• Reality

…you also remove happiness, because happiness is the emotional reward of living as a rational, discriminating, valuing being in reality.

Many mystics wish to escape reality to embrace a supernatural, transcendent "non-world." 

Not to leave earth on a spiritual journey to find a better world, but to “exist” in a dimension completely alien to earth entirely. A place without space or time, without a self and without activity or action.

But why? And for who? 

They don't believe in identity, logic, individuality, judgment, or ego and they wish to destroy their desire.

Yet they still desire to trade ones real nature for that of a disembodied, passive, unaccountable “mist”.

It’s a senseless refusal to live as the human being one is.

It's the subconscious and implicit declaration that:

• I loathe who I've become

• I can't deal with reality

• I wish for happy feelings divorced from effort

• I never want to bear responsibility again

A floating, indiscriminate “bliss” is not happiness.
 It is psychological self-abandonment.

✅ T. The Need for a New Term: Pseudo-Happiness

Most languages lump all positive emotions under the single word “happiness.”
 This is a conceptual error.

There are two radically different phenomena:

1. Genuine Happiness

The long-range emotional approval of one’s life, earned through autonomous, reality-oriented action guided by integrity.

This happiness includes those who:

• Act with courage

• Live with dignity

• Exercise the intelligence they have

• Have high standards

2. Pseudo-Happiness

The surface-level, unearned emotional ease produced when consciousness is detached from reality.

Pseudo-happiness is ersatz happiness. It is an inferior counterfeit that mimics the real thing.

This ersatz happiness includes:

• Jordan Belfort’s manic highs

• Buddhist monks’ meditative sedation and evasion

• Religious cultists’ "bliss" through obedience

• Service to something greater than yourself (which is actually relinquishment of your ability to earn happiness)

• Surrender to a higher purpose or power (the abdication of sovereign independence in exchange for someone else’s "plan")

• Primitive tribesmen’s contentment inside a savage worldview of cannibalism and violent "justice"

• Nihilistic drug use fleeing a mind of clear precision and competency 

• Spiritualists doting on collective "oneness" whilst ignoring real individuals

• The random luck of lottery winners, which divorces cause from effect and leaves them feeling empty 

• The apathetic attitudes of spoiled heirs’ unearned pleasure

• Those who are desperate to maintain good vibes, no matter the cost

• One dimensionalists who ignore the bad to solely focus on the good and in turn end up being victimized

• Optimists who evade all negativity in fear of breaking an illusory worldview 

• Cowards who hyper-fixate on positivity because they believe they can't handle the truth

• Social conformity, herd mentality, monkey see-monkey doers, sheeple

• Fantasists who evade reality like a poisonous smog, preferring to hide in mainstream approved fictions

• The everything is "unconditional love" types, who excise all meaning from love via indiscriminate blanketing  

• The non-judgmental superiority mentality of those who judge others who judge as beneath them 

This is not happiness.
It is the illusion of emotional success without the substance of cognitive integration.

Pseudo-happiness is:

• Short-range

• Fragile

• Reality-blind

• Dependent on ignorance or evasion

• Easily shattered by truth

• Unaccompanied by self-esteem

• Incapable of supporting long-term flourishing

Genuine happiness, in contrast, requires:

• Thought

• Choice

• Responsibility

• Integrity

• Personal authorship

• Reality contact

• Non-contradiction

• The conviction “I earned this.”

This is why happiness is not just a smile, a mood, or an attitude.
 A fool can smile. A coward can feel serene. A deluded mystic can feel bliss.
 Animals can feel contentment.

But only a sovereign mind can feel happiness.

✅ U. The Role of Honest Effort

One does NOT need perfect knowledge to be happy.
 They do not need to be a professional philosopher, scientist or an intellectual.

They need to make:

An honest commitment to understanding reality and integrating their life.

Happiness requires the attempt to make sense of the world, the effort to live rationally, and the intention to avoid contradiction—not perfect epistemic success.

A person with mistaken beliefs can be happy if:

• They sincerely attempt to understand reality

• They do not knowingly evade

• Their worldview allows for the possibility of coherent action

• Their life integrates reasonably well

• They believe—honestly—that their life and the world makes sense

They can be wrong and still be happy.
 But they cannot be consistently evasive and be happy.

One has to believe they've put effort into understanding themselves and the world accurately, even if they haven't acquired real knowledge. It's the attempt which is crucial.

Happiness requires one to try integrating the sum of their ideas without overt evasion or excessive cognitive dissonance.

Happiness requires integrity and sovereignty—not omniscience.

• Autonomy is the freedom to think and act.

• Sovereignty is the metaphysical fact that you must think and act for yourself.

• Happiness is the emotional reward for exercising sovereignty coherently.

• Pseudo-happiness is the counterfeit produced when reality is not just bypassed, but rejected.

Only the sovereign mind can earn happiness, because only the sovereign mind can "own" its life.

✅ V. Powerful Acceptance vs. Passive Resignation

Acceptance is necessary for happiness — but only when understood correctly.
People often confuse acceptance with approval, or with helpless resignation, but these are fundamentally different psychological acts.

1. Acceptance Means Acknowledging Reality, Not Endorsing It

To accept something is simply to recognize the facts:

• “I am unhappy with this part of my life.”

• “My current habits are not producing the results I want.”

• “The world contains evil.”

• “I lack romantic connection.”

• “I’m financially unstable.”

Acceptance is cognitive, not moral. It is the act of seeing clearly.

Approval is evaluative:

• “This is good.”

• “This is right.”

• “This is how things should be.”

You can accept that something is, while fiercely disapproving of it — and working to change it.

2. Happiness Requires Acceptance Because Happiness Requires Contact with Reality

A person who refuses to accept painful truths must blind themselves:

• Denying loneliness prevents forming real relationships.

• Denying fear prevents developing courage.

• Denying failure prevents learning.

• Denying unhappiness prevents identifying and solving life-problems.

Suppressing the truth does not eliminate suffering — it buries your awareness of it and removes your ability to act on it.

Happiness requires honest self-awareness, because values can only be pursued from a correct map of reality.

3. Acceptance As The First Step of Agency

Stoic-style resignation says:

“Accept what you cannot change, detach from what you desire, eliminate preference.”

This is passive acceptance masquerading as wisdom.

Rational acceptance says:

“See what is so that you can understand what should be, and take action where action is possible.”

Acceptance becomes a tool of agency:

• Accepting your loneliness → gives you the power to confront it and seek relationships.

• Accepting your unhappiness → gives clarity about which values are missing.

• Accepting the existence of evil → energizes moral defense and action.

• Accepting poor health → provides the starting point for improvement.

• Accepting lack of skill → creates the foundation for mastery.

You must first accept a fact to do anything about it.

4. Acceptance Strengthens Rather Than Weakens You

Denial weakens because it fractures your mind.
 It requires constant distortion, suppression, and evasion.

Acceptance strengthens because it:

• Removes cognitive dissonance

• Ends self-deception

• Produces clarity of values

• Enables rational planning

• Directs motivation toward reality

• Unifies your emotional and intellectual life

You cannot fight what you cannot face.
 You cannot improve what you refuse to acknowledge.
 You cannot achieve values while lying about their current state.

5. Happiness Requires A Realistic Vision of Your Life

Happiness is the emotional experience of knowing that your life is good, your values are attainable, and you are succeeding at creating a life worth living.

To form that judgment, you must:

1. See what is.

2. Evaluate it honestly.

3. Decide what should be.

4. Act to close the gap.

If you skip step 1 — acceptance — every other step collapses.

6. Powerful Acceptance in One Sentence

Powerful acceptance is the choice to face reality as it is — not to surrender to it, but to gain the clarity needed to transform it.

✅ W. The Challenge Is Worthwhile

Happiness is the proof that life is worth the struggle.
 It is the conscious experience that makes continued existence meaningful.
 It is the psychological confirmation that reality is knowable, one can learn, their values are achievable, and their life is worth living.

✅ X. Summary

Happiness is:

• The positive conscious appraisal of reality as supporting one’s values

• The earned reward for rational action, integrity, and self-valuing

• A long-range emotional condition, not a mood

• The mind’s affirmation that “my life is intelligible and is good for me”

It can coexist with sadness, grief, anger, or frustration — because happiness is not the absence of negative emotions, but the dominance of positive meaning.

A happy person needs a life they can rationally approve of, across enough domains, consistently enough, to say:

“I want to live, I value my life, and it's worth continuing."

Happiness is the psychological reward for living as man qua man:
 rational, productive, independent, self-responsible, and oriented across the full span of one’s life.

But happiness, while essential, is not the summit. There is a higher, more integrated form of it — a state not just of feeling well, but of being fully right with existence itself.