Theorem:
In general, humans can never be truly happy.
Proof:
First let me state that true happiness is in this case defined as happiness that lasts more than two thirds of the person’s lifespan after age 20. This is to eliminate a child’s ignorance of all the miseries of life. This means that if you live 40 years and are happy for at least 13 and a third of those ((40 – 20) x 2 / 3) then you have experienced what I call true happiness. This is an arbitrary choice and reflects what I think would be a significant time to be happy.
I now define happiness. Happiness is that which makes us feel what we consider to be happy, regardless of the case. Happiness is expressed when we acquire something we want, regardless of what it is. This can be love, shoes, a car or even quietness. This cannot be defined as it is purely subjective in this context. We are all – unless we’re abnormal – thought to associate the word “happy” to a feeling. This feeling is then bound to the word and vice versa. Therefore if we consider ourselves to be happy, then we are happy by definition, under the previous stated condition.
I now elaborate on happiness. It is in our nature to always want and desire certain things. Let me state that in this case a “thing” is anything that can cross our minds in any shape or form or lack thereof. If we did not want or desire things, we would live meaningless lives with no goals or progress. Desires can range from explicitly wanting nothing to wanting everything and anything in between. Here I exclude instincts of hunger, etc. as explicit desires. These things that we desire which are the only links to happiness are never in our possession because it is this longing that primarily contributes to the fact of it being happiness and that without it, it wouldn’t be considered as such. Once these things are obtained, they are no longer desired or longed for because we do not long for something which is in our possession, otherwise it wouldn’t be longing or desire.
I now define true happiness. True happiness is a continuous set of events of happiness. Whenever discontinuity occurs, the set is emptied and true happiness is ignored. A discontinuity occurs when an event of unhappiness is present in the set. If the cardinality of the set in which every element represents a time step of happiness is equal to the required time steps for true happiness then true happiness is obtained. We long for things on a regular basis. Regardless of the time interval between longings, if no happiness can be achieved consecutively, then there is bound to be a discontinuity in the set of happiness by probability, in a normal sense. I do not wish to deny possibility for extreme cases but only for the normal case of a normal human being. If happiness can only be achieved by our obtaining that which once obtained is no longer desired but instead is replaced by another then we can say that no human being will ever truly be happy due to the unavoidable discontinuity that is bound to occur. Therefore, in general, no human will ever be truly happy.