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You kind of touched on points of this video, although from a different direction. Daniel Khaneman talks about the experiencing self versus the remembering self, which is in charge, and how that relates to happiness.

https://youtu.be/XgRlrBl-7Yg

I read the paper but grant my ability to understand it is limited. My interpretation is built on what's discussed at the end of Kahneman's Ted presentation: https://youtu.be/XgRlrBl-7Yg?t=1015

Is that why the downvote? I linked the paper people can make their own interpretation... that's at least as praise worthy as "common sense".

This is a bit of a tangent to your question, but I've been thinking about this a bit too. I've been depressed lately as well, and this ted talk [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg ] was really interesting. It has nothing to do with being more happy, but has to do with how we define happiness and how we experience it... (being over-analytical and also unhappy, I thought it was quite good)

It basically says that the concept happiness as we think of it is really two things, the "experiential self", which is happy when we're snowboarding or whatever, and the remembering self, which is happy when we're deploying some code that's going to take over the world or whatnot.

It seems to me, from observation, that unless you are the rare .01 percent who really, really, gets paid well to do the things you want, (I'm not counting Tim Ferris types- that's just a hack) that life is a dissapointment, and at some point you just get over it and live your life and try not to stress out too much about your remembering self, and try to pay some attention to your experiential self. Or, that is to say, that at a certain point, people stop worrying so much about their remembering self's expectations of their future memories... err, that is to say that it's not that you want to be happy, it's that you have an expectation to be satisfied at a later time with your choices and actions. And then at some point you have to change those expectations.

This may sound like pyscho-babble at this point, but it really gets to something I've been thinking a lot about lately, namely "am I happy?". Should the question be... "am I satisfied with my life?" or... "am I having fun?"... well, this concept of the two selves really helps defines what you mean when you talk about happy.

Of course, completely satisfying one self or another isn't a solution, but generally I feel enlightened for having been exposed to this concept.