Is Happiness Simply a Matter of Having More Pleasure?

If happiness were simply the sum of pleasant moments, the best life would seem to be one that maximises comfortable experiences and minimises discomfort. Yet this faces an intuitive difficulty: many activities that belong to a good life are not consistently easy or pleasant while we are doing them.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle uses eudaimonia to discuss living well or human flourishing. It is not a passing feeling but an activity through which a person exercises capacities and virtues across a life. Aristotle does not reject pleasure. He argues that good activities have pleasures appropriate to them, but pleasure cannot be detached from the activity and made the whole standard. Mill continues to define happiness through pleasure, yet distinguishes the quality of pleasures and rejects calculation by intensity and quantity alone.

Learning a skill one genuinely values, for example, may involve frustration, repetition and temporary discomfort. If we recorded only immediate feelings, it might compare poorly with effortless entertainment. Yet it can enlarge a person’s capacities, create a durable direction and change their relationship with the world.

My judgement is that pleasure is important evidence of happiness, but not its complete definition. Appealing to ‘a whole life’ must not become an excuse for dismissing present suffering either. A more reliable judgement considers the quality of experience, developing capacities, relationships and whether one’s choices can be sustained, rather than declaring any single pleasure or pain to be the answer to a life.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm