- because I think it's kind of clever but mainly
- because I want to know if it matches other people's experience
You can chart people's happiness over time. What usually happens is, something good will happen, and happiness will go up, and then it'll gradually return to baseline. Or something bad will happen, and happiness will go down, and gradually return to baseline.
There are limits to happiness and sadness. Nobody's happiness is constantly increasing or decreasing. You get to a certain level, and nothing can be added that could possibly make you happier. These moments are usually etched in our memories pretty strongly. I can certainly remember the happiest time of my life! Incidentally, these are usually times when the people around us have been extremely happy, too. It's very hard to be happy when it's coming at the expense of other people...at least, at the expense of other people who you care about in any way.
What we call "suffering" is actually the negative derivative of happiness. That is, you "suffer" when your happiness is going from a high level to a low level. And here I have one of my own critiques of this theory: "suffering" also happens when you're just completely stuck at a low level of happiness. So maybe there's a better way to express this.
Overall life satisfaction is the negative derivative of suffering (or the second derivative of happiness). That is, you're satisfied with your life when you're decreasing the amount of suffering.
This means that life satisfaction is 0 when the amount of suffering is constant, even if the amount of suffering is 0. Even if the happiness levels are high. There is absolutely no life satisfaction that you get from living "the good life" if you've always lived the good life.
Life satisfaction is only positive if you decrease your suffering...which means that you had to be suffering a fair amount in the first place. Or if you're decreasing the suffering of those around you (as the happiness of people around you strongly tracks your own happiness).
So the way to a satisfying life is to put yourself in situations where you're not happy, and then change yourself or your environment so you're happy. In other words, get into uncomfortable situations, then get out of them.
Calvin's dad was right.
