The word happiness comes from the Viking word: "hap" which means luck. Happiness it is a lot like gambling, because it is dependent so much on your performance in the world. And a huge part of your performance is influenced by luck.
If you have a tournament of poker from all the people that play in that tournament only one person is going to win, so that person is going to be happy, and the rest of them anything else than happy.
Sure you can work hard, but at the end of the day a lot of what makes successful people successful is being lucky enough to have good circumstances like: good genetics, healthy environments to grow up in etc.
Even if you work hard and you took the time to build the necessary skills, if you don't get lucky your efforts are not going to worth anything. If you are a very good poker player, if you don't have good hands you won't win the game, no matter how good you are. Skills are just preparation for whenever you get lucky.
By the nature of happiness will make most people who pursue it unsuccessful. Not only that most people will fail from the start, but even the people who get lucky will go through phases of being happy and unhappy, like a roller coaster ride. Because happiness is dependent on your performance, and your performance will fluctuate every day, this also means that your happiness will have significant fluctuations every day.
This is why the pursuit of power can be very addictive, because you experience the picks and wally of your happiness, you are left with a constant sense of insecurity, of a felling that you can never have enough no matter how much do you get, so you always wan't more.
And in this pursuit of getting more and more of a thing that it is impossible to get enough, you no longer do whatever you chose, instead you do whatever will give you the next fix of happiness. In other words you lost your autonomy.
Most people give up their autonomy for a chance to gamble, I guess this is what you could call the archetype of a contract with the devil. An exchange of your apparent freedom for pleasure and happiness, but at the end it works out to be a scam because happiness and pleasure are not what they appear to be, not only it won't offer you any long lasting contempt, but most people won't accomplish it to begin with.
