What is Happiness? External influences

I'm hoping to do a series of posts where I take a different emotion and analyze exactly what that emotion is and means (if I'm successful.) So I'll start with happiness. Happiness is what? Firstly, let's consider the exterior. What makes us happy in the world? Happiness by external means can be considered in different ways. Firstly, there is the kind of happiness that we hopefully all feel and that is parental/sibling happiness. Beyond ourselves, this is the first kind of happiness it is possible to experience. Psychologists say we have to be held and we have to experience positive emotional feedback. If this is attained, as infants, we live with an early, unconscious kind of pleasurable state that can only be termed happy because the opposite of positive early development can only be deemed unhappy. As youths, without the conscious experience that comes with age, we can only exist in one of these two states as we're not learned enough to know shades of gray. As we grow older, we begin to experience ourselves. We begin to realize what we think (even if we don't yet know how or why we think it.) As we're taught things, presumable life lessons, by our parents and teachers, we begin to set our thoughts against the background of these concepts. As we're not yet mature or aware enough to be strong in ourselves, we naturally compare what we know of ourselves against these qualifications. A powerful, early state of happiness or unhappiness is created in these moments (assuming the young person is in a relatively normal social world.) If the young person's thoughts and feelings match up with what is considered good in their environment, the person is happy. It is like passing through a gate while traveling through a world the traveler doesn't understand. The traveler is happy when the gate opens and the traveler is able to continue. If the young person's thoughts and feelings do not harmonize with his or her surroundings, only emotional stress can arise. If validation is all the young person can value, then clashing with the accepted standards will create emotions such as confusion, unease, fear, panic, perhaps anger or other such emotions. A strong, intelligent, older person can rationalize (and even embrace) these kinds of emotions as being part of life. The mature mind can cope but the younger mind can't seek such refuge of the experienced and will feel the stress and pain that the possibility of dislike or rejection will create. Such a state of being cannot be considered anything other than unhappy. Only a young masochist could possibly be happy in such moments of painful emotion but that is the product of an emotionally malfunctioning brain. The possibility that the young person receives mixed messages both from early teachers and parents should also be considered. With age, the young person can see these realities as being part of the gray area of human reality but can only become confused by such mixed messages at such a life stage. As the young person grows older, he or she, through often painful experience, begins to process information from their environment both at home and at school. Peers become vitally influential and parents less so. A diverse educational process allows the maturing young adult to see life being lived from many different perspectives by seemingly different people. The young adult, if experiencing doubt about their sexuality or other important emotional issue, may find succor at this moment by realizing that there are people in the world just like them. This will lighten unhappy feelings of confusion and doubt. At this point, the maturing adult becomes not quite happy with HAPPIER. The maturing adult now lives in a world of differences, different people and different things. Their emotional burden is less but they realize that there are people in the world who dislike who and what they are and always will. The maturing adult learns that you can't please everyone. There is no such thing as total and absolute acceptance. This creates the opposite states of awareness that the world is full of potential friends and potential enemies. Young adults at this stage begin to pursue and find their friends and create their social groupings of like minds. They find their social happiness in groups of similar people. Popular people hang with the other popular people. Outcasts find each other. People with similar creative interests or favorite sports teams or similar unconscious insecurities socialize together. A truly mature adult would then grow to not only include those in their own social grouping but will try to make friends with people in other groupings. Unfortunately, this is often not the case in our often ignorant, frightened society. Many in our world stay in their like minded social groups and never leave them. Popular kids continue to aim high and achieve a higher social status than others. Outcasts grow to hate the world. People with similar religious beliefs grow to hate others with different beliefs, etc. Such social distinctions are based on fear, whether it be the fear of the unknown or the fear of the other person and that fear, being an unpleasant emotion, cannot make the sufferer happy. Narrow world views cannot be happy unless the individual's conscious mind is either ignorant to ways other people think and feel or is constantly fed data designed to keep the individual in a sense of social stagnation. Certain preachers telling their followers about the horrors of other religions only, without telling them positives of the other person's faith, is an example. The preacher's intent is to keep the lay person in the flock by telling half truths designed to keep the listener firmly in that social grouping. The follower is then socially stagnated as they are only active within one circle of people, no matter how large, that think and feel the same way of things. If an individual is stuck in such situations, he or she can only be considered socially happy if they are oblivious to all outside their realm of consciousness. That, however, is not the real world. The real world is loaded with many different things and many different people with many different styles and cultures. Only by experiencing the real world in all its shades can a person strive to achieve full happiness in the external world. All that is true has to be considered. As I am not married or have children, I'll end my dialogue on external influences that affect happiness at this point. I'll continue with the idea of happiness as experienced via internal influences. To go with my previous thoughts, an internal way of perceiving social happiness can be derived by ones mental attitude. Accepting the world for what it is and enjoying the differences can be modified to the view that, yes, the external world is full of differences but we, as people, are all similar underneath. In such a view, we become Disney's Small World in a way that can make us feel happy as we are content that we are all flesh and blood down deep. Such perceptions, those that come from personal awareness, education and possibly an introverted mind will be discussed in my next post. Thank you for reading this far.