Happiness part 2 - Why is it important?

I've been thinking about why happiness is so important to us as human beings. What I've come up with so far is that there are two factors:

Achievement: Happiness is a goal, and as animals, we enter into goal-oriented behaviour. What brings us happiness is achievement, which brings satisfaction. The sense of achievement one gets from completing a challenge is greater than something which is easily achieved, which is why commodity fetishism never brings anything other than merely fleeting happiness.

Fear: Happiness is important to us because we have been taught to fear it's 'opposite', i.e. sadness, or even worse, depression. Both sadness and depression are natural states (though I feel compelled to clarify myself, I am not talking about clinical depression, but rather an intense sadness). We can't deal with sadness or depression in a constructive way ourselves, I think. There is a whole industry of self-help books and life coaching that says we must work towards resolving our issues in a series of (perhaps twelve) steps. It is no longer acceptable to just be sad; but isn't it a shame that everybody wants to be happy all of the time? Surely happiness just blurs together and becomes devalued if one is happy all the time.

Here is a video about the previous paragraph:



Happiness part 1 - Ratio