It’s impossible to duplicate happiness.
If you’re ever in a period in your life, whether it’s in a country, with someone, in a job that brings you a lot of happiness and there is a break where you are absent from it, you simply cannot go back and re-live the same level of happiness that you experienced the first time.
It’s hard for many people to accept that, especially if there are places or people that made them happy in the past that no longer bring that same level of enjoyment to them at present, whether it’s due to things changing on their part or other external factors.
Is there really a remedy to it? All that can be said is that if there is something, some place or someone that makes you happy than stick with it until it doesn’t anymore. At least know that whatever happiness you got out of it has passed before you move on.
Happiness almost works as a drug, you have peaks (Highs), you have troughs (Lows), but you have that baseline, that baseline is what regulates you, you seek peaks but they don’t last forever, you have troughs and you seek to come back to your baseline, then at your baseline you’re seeking that next high (Withdrawl symptoms?), but it won’t ever last forever. The honeymoon only lasts for ever so long before you mundanely drift back to your baseline.
So does your baseline change? With a new environment? Changes to your financial position? Your environment doesn’t change your inherent disposition. It provides little increases to your pleasure level, but it always falls back to where it was at the start. Altering your belief system can certainly affect the regulator of your temperament, but only by a slight extent. So does money change this? Even money can’t change the basic emotions and insecurities we all feel, either from not having enough or not feeling fulfilled. It means the human experience is the same for everyone. It’s better to have money than not, but it doesn’t solve everything
If you’re ever in a place in your life where everything is going right, you’re at ease with yourself; you would be a sucker to let it go. Know that.
Inside The University of Melbourne 