But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth—overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it.
And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become
happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling
from pain—and thinking, interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running.
As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content than we might otherwise be. We
often fail to appreciate what we have until we have lost it. We crave experiences, objects,
relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the craving persists. I speak from
experience, of course.