I'm in Costa Rica, sweating through my shirt, and my friend (who's a psychiatrist, which sometimes makes conversations feel like ambush therapy) asks me what happiness is.

I was mid-bite of something. Mango, maybe. I don't remember. What I remember is feeling confused by the question, which is strange because I think about happiness constantly. I've probably thought about it more than anyone should. But hearing it out loud, from her, while I'm trying to enjoy a perfectly good piece of fruit under a tree that keeps dropping things near my head, felt like being asked to explain why I'm breathing.

I didn't have an answer ready. Or I had too many. For a long time, I thought happiness was just... winning. Getting the thing. The gold star, the job, the girl noticing me in seventh grade. Psychologists call this the "hedonic treadmill": We get what we want, feel good briefly, and then our baseline resets and we're chasing the next thing. It worked the way sugar works. Great for 10........

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