As a rule, what people need to be happy is that their basic needs are met and they have emotional and social bonds with a community who they help/benefit and who help/benefit them in return.

So much of modern society is designed to make that harder, either deliberately or as an emergent property of greed or hunger for power. You're being STOPPED from being happy.

To the extent that you have to work to be happy, it's because we collectively have created all kinds of barriers to being happy.

Capitalism drives people to be focused on work, exhausted, and isolated. It makes us have to push ourselves to find joy deliberately, exhaust ourselves trying to find and cultivate community.

Even clinical depression usually isn't just magically *there* -- it's almost always rooted in some real external force: a trauma, a persistent impediment to getting needs met, etc.

And just like removing a dropped weight doesn't un-crush your foot, it's usually not enough to find and remove the cause; we can end up long-term or even permanently broken and need supports. But the cause was still an external one.

With occasional exceptions, humans are wired to be happy. Happy is the default. We're not supposed to have to fight just to be happy.

There are enough things that can just go wrong because of bad luck that can produce barriers to happiness. But we've built a society that creates so many artificial barriers on top of those risks.

So please, stop beating yourself up for not being able to be happy. It's almost certainly not because anything is wrong with you. We live in a world that constantly works to make us unhappy.

It's worth fighting for your happiness. But it's also important to give yourself some grace when it doesn't work, because it's fucking HARD to fight the inertia of culture and society.