Happiness isn't a thing you do or don't do. It's a state you find yourself in or not. And while we can easily pinpoint reasons we might feel 'unhappy', we can't realiably do the same for happy.. . What it is useful to strive for is 'satisfied' and you will find that most can reach this. The problem with eliminating unhappy is that there is a long list of irritants and as soon as you manage to get rid of the first item on that list, the second item becomes the first and so on and on.... . We tend to think of happy and unhappy as a sort of balanced scale thing. But it isn't really like that. It is more like, 'happy about this' and 'upset about that over there'. Happiness, just like sadness, tends to live in certain parts of our lives over other parts. When we stay in those parts where we are happiest, we are generally satisfied with that. When we focus on those other parts, it works the other way around.. . What's really interesting is that whenever we focus to long on either, it just evaporates away. We can't sustain either feeling for very long. That's why we like sad songs, poems or movies. They seem to flush away our capacity to feel sad for a time. Which gives us the odd rule that if you don't want to be unhappy, be unhappy for awhile and work it out of your system.