Is happiness an acquired taste?

When someone asks you what makes you happy, do you always know the answer? Can you put a pen to paper and list five things that unfailingly make you smile--with pleasure and completely and utterly selfish delight? I can't. Happiness is such a swiftly moving entity, such a volatile emotion, and such a fleeting moment in time, that I can never really put my finger on what makes me happy.

Which is something my heart understands and accepts, but my mind finds weird... Because isn't the point of all existence--every action, each achievement, each race, each breath even, to be happy? So by that logic, if I don't even know what makes me happy, what chance do I have of ever being it? So does that mean I'm destined to look for something that I don't know where to look for? It's a little bit like trying to remember someone you never knew, right?

Which made me wonder, if happiness is subjective to each one of us, if it is an intensely personal thought, an idea that our mind conjures up and our heart accepts; how come the world's most freely given but least used advice is always, ALWAYS, an attempt to help you find this happiness thingy? The reasons of the mind are simple enough--if you're poor, money must make you happy. If you're single, finding love must make you happy. And if you live in a shit hole, a big house must be the answer. They're all good reasons, all solid logical deductions.

Except, when you really think about it, all these assumptions are simply thoughts that have been drummed into our heads and stitched into our social fabric for so long that they've become a part of our collective conscious. Everything we've ever read, heard, taught and are exposed to, tells us that a small house, little money and being alone are bad things, and therefore, reasons to be unhappy. But are these beliefs really our own? And when our behaviour is governed by these thoughts, we don't make choices, we simply practise learned behaviour. By that logic, then, what we assume to be happiness, and things that lead us to it, must also be learned behaviour, right?

It boggles the mind, how certain we are of things that we have little or no understanding of. It is an uncomfortable thought, thinking that you really have no clue as to what the path to our ultimate destination is. And a humbling one as well.

I know I haven't been happy for some time now. People around me know it too, in varying degrees. But what bothers me more than the fact that I'm not happy is that I have no idea how to get there. I don't know what's missing. I don't know what I want and how I'm going to get it. That's a scary juncture in life. The day you realise that you're a cliche, just a number in a crowd, the idea of happiness takes on a new meaning. And you retrace your steps in your head, trying to learn more from your journey, from your many mistakes and few successes. At least that's what I think is happening to me right now.

I don't want my happiness to be learned behaviour. I want it to be an acquired taste. Like that perfect dress that you believed existed somewhere, but you were meant to trawl through several malls before you found it in a little store on forgotten lane. Or like the day when you discover that your poison is actually Breezer, a drink you had written off at 18.

Have I found that kind of happiness? No. I'm not even close. Will I ever find it? I hope so. Because it would be tragic if I don't. Not to mention terrifying, because it isn't easy to accept that you really have no control over such a HUGE part of your life. That your purpose depends almost entirely on chance. What if life takes me on a path that doesn't let me try on enough dresses to know which is the one for me? What if I never go on the road that houses that store? What is worse--knowing you're not happy, or assuming you're happy because you're not unhappy?

Does anyone have an answer?