The Pursuit of Happiness, Part 2

So what is happiness? Economists talk about something called "utility," which can be roughly defined as goodness or usefulness or value, but these are not the same as happiness. I'd like to think about happiness as an object. Not a garden-variety object of the sort that you'd find loitering under a twenty-five-cent tag at a garage sale. No, I'm thinking of a more metaphorical, more abstract object, but still an object with three dimensions.
Happiness, I would argue, has height and breadth and length. We'll take a few minutes now to examine the first of these three dimensions, height.
The height of happiness seems to me pretty obvious. Imagine for a moment that you're driving along a busy road. If you're like me, you simply hate red lights, recognizing them for what they are: a conspiracy by public works types to foul up your schedule. As you drive along, coming up to one of those intersections that doesn't really need a stoplight but has one anyway, you see the scowling visage of the red light. "No," you think to yourself. "I do not want to stop for this ridiculous light at a cross-street where one car comes along every four hours." And then something magical happens. The light turns green and you drive through unimpeded.
Happy? Of course you're happy. I'm happy when I'm waiting for some slow webpage--some blogger page perhaps--to load and it finally pops into view. Yes, that's a little chunk of happiness, but it's not a very tall chunk.
What would be an example of tall happiness? You've just gotten engaged to the most fabulous person on earth. That's a tall chunk of happy. You've just found a bag with $187,000 in it. Tall happy!
But here's where the limits of the height of happiness come in. When I'm riding a great roller-coaster or hooking a fish or biting into a Chipotle burrito, I experience a significantly lofty bit of happiness. It's tall, but that's all it is. To get really great happiness, we'll have to go beyond tall happiness. And that's where we'll take this investigation next time. Unless I decide to take it elsewhere.