Happiness is over-rated, it's not the be all and end all in life. Yes it's nice to be happy, but I don't think it's the ultimate goal like many others. You know who's happy all the time? Monks and bums, because they have nothing to worry about. They do nothing all day and add nothing to society or our civilization. Stress and worry are an integral part of success, some of the greatest people were not happy people.
But what is the point of "success" if not to create happiness for yourself and other people. If material success made me and other people unhappy, I would not want it. Wee-adjusted humans are designed to be happy when part of a family/community and achieving good in the world. That is why I think for psychological normal people happiness is the highest ultimate goal. People who create and experience unhappiness through their success (more so that is they did not strive for that goal) are IMHO focusing on the wrong thing. Because if your achievements are not creating happiness they are pursued for the sake of money and ego alone.
What I am getting at is there are some very important people in history who were not happy campers, but did a lot of great things. It's not just about money and ego, it's about adding to society and our civilization. Freud, Beethoven, Dickens, Lincoln the list goes on and on. These great people could have not pursued their ambitious goals and worked only on personal happiness. But what would the world have lost if they did?
Happiness starts from the inside. Happiness is about loving yourself and accepting your fate rather than trying too hard to change what cannot be reversed. Everyone has a different definition of happiness but what makes me happy is achieving my dreams.
Happiness means closeness to family. Happiness means living in a manner where you aren't restricted by other peoples agendas. I think I've always try to maintain myself in a happy state. My support system of friends and family keep me happy. My belief in God and Christ also brings happiness into my life.
Associate mental state produced upon the fulfillment of my desire/successful exertion of my will. Those desires and wills are capricious, arbitrary, superficially unrelated/not cohesive, and oftentimes in conflict. I desire both the struggle and the finish, for example, and would not be content lacking either, but at any given point they are obviously exclusive. No doubt they've all a biological origin. Perhaps the wills can be reduced to a primal will, a will to power or truth or reproduction or life or hedonic pleasure (though given how often I seek out the reverse of the last, I can hardly see how), so my happiness comes whenever I feel myself in power or secure in my continued survival or well justified in my actions/beliefs or on the path to self-replication or flooded with dopamine, melatonin, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, and enkephalins. On a related note, I've always defined intelligence generally as the capacity to achieve one's aims in a given contact (ie fulfill one's desires, succesfully exert one's will, be "happy"). There are other ways of defining it with more specific criteria that put it add odds with other conceptions of happiness, but I've always liked my definitions best.
Everybody will have their own opinion on what happier is and I think it's a very individual thing. For some, happiness is all about money and material possessions but in reality I thing it as to be gauged on the people you have in your life rather than what you own.
I'll be honest, I haven't felt happiness if any in recent years but the things that do lift my mood is when I can look at something I've done and think to myself "yep, I did that". It can be something so simple as cleaning the bath to washing the car. I can look at what I've done and feel proud that I've done it, and in a way can feeling good about your accomplishments be connected to happiness? Seeing a beautiful sunset and sunrise also lifts my mood.
What a great question and so many wonderful answers. I enjoyed reading each and everyone of them. Reading what all of you said made me feel happy! Happiness is appreciating all the simply things in life. Every day is not going to be a good day but there is good and positive in every day that we live. If we have family who love us, food on our table and a roof over our head we have so much more then many others have. In order to be happy you need to find that peace within yourself. Happiness is in your heart and in yourself.
For me it means peace, and the ability to appreciate the simple things in life. It also means freedom from want, and the ability to travel and do what I want without worrying about every single dime. It means being able to commune with friends and family. Most of all though just contentment. It means being satisfied with your place in the world.