According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, you have a happiness set point.
And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point.
She was one of only three professional performers in the 1967 Soviet movie "Asya's Happiness," set on a collective farm.
Lincoln had long opposed the expansion of slavery, declaring it wrong, morally and politically, because it violated the rights of all people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, his intellectual equal — and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him.
These are pretty and colorful, but they are hung in the middle of a dark, turgid night sky: a sort of dream of happiness set against a world of doubt and sorrow.
Later on, after his daughter has been lost to him, Stoner finds real love again with a young student, his intellectual equal and once again an enemy, seeing his happiness, sets out to take it from him.
Then the happiness set in.
As Schopenhauer put it, money is abstract happiness, so someone who is no longer capable of concrete happiness sets his whole heart on money.
This happiness set point is assumed to be genetically determined and is likely to reflect stable and relatively immutable personality traits.
