“Happiness is almost not worth talking about because the instant you turn happiness into a goal it isn’t attainable any more. In other words, happiness isn’t something you can work towards. It isn’t something you can put someplace and overcome barriers to get to and so it makes a kind of difficult subject to talk about.

The thing which I think needs to be talked about is at the other end of the spectrum, the barriers to realizing happiness. The barriers to realizing happiness are a lot of very unhappy things. And they are the things which almost nobody talks about because very few of us are willing to confront those things…

People get the idea that enlightened beings never have bad days. If you’ve got that idea, you’ve got a false standard against which to measure the quality of your life. One of the things that can keep you from happiness, very assuredly, is false standards. If you’ve built up a set of notions about someplace that you ought to be, that it isn’t possible to be, simply because it isn’t real, then you can only be there by concept. That’s a way of making sure that you’re unhappy.” ~ Werner Erhard