> Your own happiness is just an emotion happening inside your head; how could any other person, without access to your head, tell you that you're "wrong" in perceiving that?
Saying happiness is a kind of mental state doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to be right about whether you're in it. People are constantly in denial about whether they're jealous, depressed, angry, etc. Happiness is the same thing. We all undergo some mix of positive and negative experiences in our life. We come to a conclusion about whether those add up to happiness, and that conclusion is colored by many things, like the idea that we're fulfilling some important purpose, or "crushing it" or whatever else.
As for your point about "who can tell you you're not happy", that's missing the point. It's true that someone else who is not privy to your stream of consciousness probably isn't in a position to tell you whether you're happy. But that in no way implies that your own judgment is infallible. Nothing about the world guarantees that every truth is knowable by someone, at least not easily. It may be that you're blind to your own mental state.
However, we have very good evidence in aggregate that many people chase success at the expense of happiness. They often later describe a feeling that they were deceiving themselves.
Saying happiness is a kind of mental state doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to be right about whether you're in it. People are constantly in denial about whether they're jealous, depressed, angry, etc. Happiness is the same thing. We all undergo some mix of positive and negative experiences in our life. We come to a conclusion about whether those add up to happiness, and that conclusion is colored by many things, like the idea that we're fulfilling some important purpose, or "crushing it" or whatever else.
As for your point about "who can tell you you're not happy", that's missing the point. It's true that someone else who is not privy to your stream of consciousness probably isn't in a position to tell you whether you're happy. But that in no way implies that your own judgment is infallible. Nothing about the world guarantees that every truth is knowable by someone, at least not easily. It may be that you're blind to your own mental state.
However, we have very good evidence in aggregate that many people chase success at the expense of happiness. They often later describe a feeling that they were deceiving themselves.