Source of happiness

If I try to trace my life years till now, it is basically to find happiness and know its source. As kids, we tried to find happiness in the care and admiration of our parents. We outgrew that phase. Then after we joined school, we found happiness in scoring marks. It made our parents happy, but importantly it made us feel happy. It could be any competition or sport; basically we tried to find happiness. Then getting good grades and a job offer made us happy in our colleges. Then the pay-raise and promotion made us happy in our job. Then it our new car, own house and spouse. The goal posts kept shifting.

The struggle consciously or unconsciously was to find the source of happiness. As the sources of happiness kept changing we tried to find LCM of these sources to make happiness our constant companion. We waited for our eureka moment. And we wanted to finally crack the case once for all and remain happy for ever.

We tried whipping these sources and our imagined sources for more and more happiness and we got nothing. This led to disappointment and we whipped harder and were even more disappointed. We pushed ourselves to the brink of collapse.

But with all these sources, it was one entity that was constant and may be that is the LCM that we searched. The entity is 'I'. It was me that was always there when these sources "emitted" happiness for me. So perhaps I am the source of my happiness. Perhaps the sources never emitted happiness, but I did it for myself. Are we searching for it in places it was never there?