Lately I’ve listened to podcast interview with Daniel Kahneman (one of the greatest psychologists and one of my favourite authors):
https://fs.blog/daniel-kahneman/
He talked about interesting thing. He said people seek life satisfaction (aka success, money, prestige, etc) rather than (daily) happiness, which is more social - it’s basically spending time with people we love. It seems people want tell themselves better stories about their life in comparison to other people. People sacrifice happiness for money because money is a proxy for success (which makes us satisfied with our lives). So it seems that there’s trade-off to be made: either we want to feel more positive on day to day basis, or we went more to feel positive about our life story and in comparison to others. Thus to be more happy we have to resist our natural drive to improve our life story and to compare ourselves with others, and instead employ that time, attention and energy into socializing.