It's not where you are, it's where you go

Do negative events affect us as much as we think they do?
Human resilience is really quite astonishing. People are not the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be. People who suffer real tragedy and trauma typically recover more quickly than they expect to and often return to their original level of happiness, or something close to it. That’s the good news—we are a hardy species, even though we don’t know this about ourselves. The bad news is that the good things that happen to us don’t feel as good or last as long as we think they will. So all that wonderful stuff we’re aiming for—winning the lottery, getting promoted, whatever we think will change our lives—probably won’t do it after all. We’re resilient in both directions. We rebound from distress but we also rebound from joy.

(...) Happiness is the gauge the mind uses to know if it’s doing what’s right. When I say what’s right, I mean in the evolutionary sense, not in the moral sense. Nature could have wired you up with knowing 10,000 rules about how to mate, when to eat, where to seek shelter and safety. Or it could simply have wired you with one prime directive: Be happy. You’ve got a needle that can go from happy to unhappy, and your job in life is to get it as close to H as possible. As you’re walking through woods, when that needle starts going towards U, for unhappy, turn around, do something else, see if you can get it to go toward H. As it turns out, all the things that push the needle toward H —salt, fat, sugar, sex, warmth, security— are just the things you need to survive. I think of happiness as a kind of fitness-o-meter. It’s the way the organism is constantly updated about whether its behavior is in support of, or opposition to, its own evolutionary fitness.

http://www.pantherhouse.com/newshelton/happiness-is-just-around-the-bend-2-2/