Don’t run after happiness, those doses of dopamine all time. Anything that makes you happy becomes the very source of your pain, he said.

I know but should this be the reason to stop oneself from experiencing happy moments? she asked.

What we consider happiness is often an illusion or a momentary pleasure. For example- you have a cat. Cat makes you feel good. Looking at it is a different kind of happiness. Isn’t? Despite the flickering nature of the cat, you adore it or maybe it's due to its flickering nature that you adore it. Gradually with the repetitive actions, like feeding her, it becomes a habit. Even if you get nothing in return. And if someday you don’t find the cat around, you start feeling sad as if something is lost. The root cause of this newly induced sadness is the ‘absence’. See how presence and absence have a paradoxical relationship. But you won’t feel this emotional disturbance for just any cat because you are not habitual to other cats. Only the thing that can make us happy possesses the potential to make us suffer.

Does that mean there is a danger in forming an association with some particular object of desire?

That’s what I am trying to tell. Don’t seek happiness by seeking the object of desire. It’s a mind’s habit to seek pleasure by associating one’s identity with the object of desire. And when it is lost, we assume that we have lost a part of ours too; which is merely an assumption created by our mind to replace pleasure with something of equal intensity, and what can be more intense emotion than pain? And when this pain becomes unbearable, one try to replace it with other pleasures and that’s how this vicious cycle of pleasure and pain begins.

That means anything we seek outside our ‘self’ isn’t in our control and can be taken away at any given time and so do our emotional attachment to it.

That’s true! And in this conquest of illusionary and transient happiness, we often end up giving ourselves more pain.

So what can be a possible solution according to your understanding?

Seek emotional liberation so that no one’s presence or absence can cause emotional turmoil within you. I said no one, it can be your family, friends, romantic relation or even the relationship you have with your self-created image. At times the romanticization of one’s image; inflated ego also becomes a habit that eventually becomes the very source of one’s suffering.