happiness

from John Naish's book 'Enough - Breaking free from the world of more'. Writing about the problem of the pressure to be happy...

Part of the problem is that what we call happiness is in fact a 'flow state' of unconsciousness, the sort of thing that happens when you're so engrossed in a hobby... that you just don't notice time passing. You lose yourself as your ego and your preoccupations fall away. You can't force this, but willing it to happen can cause a kind of self-help psychosis - the psychological equivalent of the watched kettle syndrome... [as] John Stuart Mill famously wrote 'Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be so.'