I think that there is hardly a more obvious assumption than the idea that every sane person’s goal in life, in short, is to achieve happiness. What is happiness, however, is an altogether different and much more complicated question. There are a number of notions that are somehow related to the concept of happiness in the consciousness of the majority of people, like love, wealth, achievement of self-expression, freedom and independence. All these and a great number of other ideas occupy very different positions in the personal lists of the most important things of every separate human being.
In fact, misbalanced approach to one’s system of values is the thing that may ruin your life, make it unhappy. If you consider love to be the most important thing, and don’t take anything else into consideration, you may very soon find that a person, who thinks of nothing else but love, is not all that lovable; a person, who neglects everything else in pursuit of wealth, may find himself stranded and disillusioned, when – if – he finally achieves it; self-expression is nothing, when there is not a single person in the world, who wants to see what you have to express, and so on.
So, what’s the way to happiness in our life? It’s hard to say and it is doubtful anybody will ever give a direct answer to it. After all, it was the question that tormented the philosophers ever since the philosophy itself appeared. I think that the best way to achieve happiness is simply to lead a decent life, in order to make its every moment a justification and reward for what you do. And a good life is the life you can at any moment look back to without wanting to change any single moment of it.