Some people claim that, though direct manufacture of happiness may be impossible, it is, indeed, possible to manipulate external objects and circumstances into a favourable design that will yield a feeling of happiness. These are the worldly people, successful people of the material world — rich, honoured, and generally accepted as intelligent. According to the worldly materialistic person, happiness is a product enjoyed by the experiencer when he is with the object of desired experience, and is favourably disposed to rhyme with the given time, place, and thing. 

The worldly materialists do admit that the experiencer will have different experiences with the same objects of experience — when they are arranged differently, or are made available at different times, or are brought into contact with the experience in different places. Your wife and children visiting your office while you are engrossed in work are a nuisance. 

The same is true when an overzealous host disturbs your midnight sleep to inquire if you would like to have a cup of tea. The problem of synchronising the subject with its favoured objects to produce happiness is difficult. It must be far easier to balance a billiard ball on a knife’s edge! Hence life has become very complicated for us. 

The subject remains the same, depending on the conditions of time and place, the very same objects provide different reactions. Nor does the subject remain stationary; he is an ever-changing entity, and with each disturbance in his physical, mental, or intellectual sheaths, he is a different personality with new demands. 

It is rare that a subject contacts the right set of objects in a favourable relationship within a given time and place. And even if this unique chance presents itself, it cannot maintain its perfection for more than a fleeting interval, since the particular set of objects has nothing but chance and movement to guarantee any permanence. 

Thus, the poor envy the rich and wish to be rich. The rich look up to the king and wish they were the king. The king seeing the cheerful cowherd wishes, `If only I were so!’ The childless yearn for children; the unmarried desire marriage; the married yearn for divorce! 

The judge is jealous of the doctor; and the doctor moans, ‘If only I were an engineer!’ Each at the very peak of his material success comes to feel its hollowness and the incompleteness of even the best that material life can offer. 

The race was taxing, the journey long, the efforts great, the endurance heroic, yet the achievement is but an unsatisfactory, flavourless glitter of happiness. 

On closer inspection, the best of life’s victories expose imperfections, and we are hurled into another thousand attempts to experience joy. Thus, from desire to desire we are driven to seek and strive, never attaining what we actually want. 

Reference: Read Daily Live Fully by Swami Chinmayananda