This is how we Americans view happiness:
If I only owned my own home (big), had a nice luxury car/sports car, had a lot of money in the bank, could buy whatever I want, travel the world, eat really great food, feel no sorrow or sadness, and have “passive income†and stay perfectly content at home I’d be perfectly happy.
The problem with this line of thinking? It is a bovine-like (cow) existence and happiness, while also making our personal happiness *dependent* upon purchasing x, y, z.
Thus the American is a trap to consumerism, workaholicism, desire for travel and exotic sights, base sexual pleasures, novelty and pain-reducing luxuries, and sloth and entertainment.
A more robust form of happiness:
A life in which we produce our own joy and create our own joy via social interactions, physical activity and exercise, arts creation and great entrepreneurship and attempting for epic risk and adventures in life!