Happiness itself, in the positive sense, is never long lasting. Human happiness is qualitatively different than that of other sentient beings. It is not enough to feel pleasure; we form expectations about the future and analyze the past to guide future actions.
The physical world is one of perpetual change; of perpetual desire for what cannot be gratified for more than a moment, for one always lives in the moment and not in the past or future. When we try to connect these unique moments, contradiction abounds to continually frustrate attempts to synthesize a single picture of the world.
We always live outside of ourselves, the physical self. The capacity of thought is merely to imagine a different world like ours, which could be if things were or will be different. Memories of the past and expectations about the future allow us to compare ourselves with a better imaginary world, or haunt us with the memory or expectation of loss. We are victims of the success of human knowledge.
The lack of foreknowledge of the future forms prejudices in the mind, expectations which are based off of what has worked before in uncertain situations. Unfortunately, most people do not change their minds when the facts change before having to learn a hard lesson. There is a tendency to stick to ideas in the face of contradictory information because we have invested ourselves into them. This is due to a desire for consistency, a freedom from worry. The bias towards certain attitudes always faces the threat of conflicting with what happens or could happen in the future. This persistence in the face of conflicting information is really motivated by our own egoistic ends, but we take them to be indicative of the truth, universal. Whereas in reality we have to make such prejudices universal, by eliminating or explaining away contradictions.
Knowledge leads ultimately to the realization that we will die, for the best we can predict about the future comes from what has always happened in the past. We live in space and time, a certain space and a certain time, and yet imagine alternatives that are possible within this checker board. Namely that our existence and that of everything we perceive is contingent. Existence will continue without us as it has for billions of what we call years.
Freedom (not in the physical sense of absence of impediment) is merely the lack of certainty between our actions and the environment. If there was complete freedom, knowledge would be impossible.
What is not determined is not knowable. In a completely undetermined universe, there would no expectations at all for there would be permanent basis to build such expectations. No regularity to establish connections between what are fundamentally different things.
This is the freedom that people talk about when invoking free will, that the actions of the will are without necessity. But this concept is mistaken. The will is merely the power to affect changes in our sensations, the establishment of this power is only possible if there is a necessary connection between will and the environment. If not, there is no way to ever know if will is the efficient cause of anything.
It could be the case that we do what we do and just happen to want what we do, but not actually do what we want. Free will advocates want not only the will to act without necessity, but that the will also has the power to determine what happens in the world it inhabits. A childhood narcissism, a feeling of absolute power over the external world. If we had this power, we would cease to be individuals, as to be something is to be opposed to something else. Fate and tragedy belong to individual existence.
Freedom of thought without action is meaningless. This is too much to ask for. We can never know with necessity what causes what, and there is no reason to believe that we as pure ego are the cause of all our actions. We are spectators, trapped in a world of objects.
There you have it; knowledge and freedom are sources of unhappiness. But they are bound up to the life of the individual. If we celebrate the individual, then we should remain respectful of the suffering involved; and embrace it as a means of self-overcoming.
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