Here goes nothing, Happiness or unhappiness is the product of either of these processes: 1. You look at yourself, treat yourself as other or object, and make a judgement about yourself (this judgement could be moral, aesthetic, whatever), 2. You look at everything but yourself, the outside world, and make a judgement about it. You’re happy when these judgements are positive judgements, unhappy when they’re negative. If happiness is what you want, than you can adjust the process in a few ways to get it.
One way is to alter the quality of your perception, say through drugs. Some recreational drugs change how we see ourselves, they can make us forget, they can make us feel (read ‘see ourselves as’ if you’ve lost the perception angle) wittier, smarter. Other drugs change how we see the world. On drugs the world can just feel better to move through, look prettier, more forgiving and fun. recreational drugs in general can make us see the same object which we were ambivalent about or even judged negatively while we were sober in a different way, they’re rose colored glasses.
Another way to effect happiness is to positively alter the object of your perception: yourself, or the world around you. This is the traditional method of achieving happiness. Selfwise, you work out so you can judge yourself beautiful, you go to school so that you can judge yourself learned, you act morally so that you can evaluate yourself as a moral person. Worldwise, you get a wife and kids and an job doing work that’s meaningful to you, or you sorround yourself with luxury (although this can be a drug-like perception alterer more than a world alterer perhaps), you go into politics and try and effect positive change, you join AA and kick your addictions. At any rate, so long as you keep the same rubric of judgement, this method will get you way happier for way longer than drugs.
Which brings us to another way you can effect happiness within this process, by changing your rubric of judgement. You can look at your object (whether the looking is reflexive or the object external), and rather than changing how you see the object or changing the object itself, you can change your understanding what would constitute good and bad, beautiful and ugly, moral and amoral; you can change your method of arriving at a positive or negative judgement. Asceticism represents this kind of transvaluation, so does Nihilism (because true nihilists aren’t all torn up about the abyss like we are).
The final way you can effect happiness is by The Entertainment, which fits into none of these categories. The Entertainment gets rid of (or at least completely distract us from) the whole self/world object entirely, and puts instead a wholly positive thing before our eyes. It eliminates dissatisfaction with self and world by diverting our attention from them, and in so doing it eliminates consciousness but not perception.