Emotional Continuum?

Originally Posted by ElectricSheep

It would be my own personal Hell to reach a point where there was no more left to do; no more left to learn and no more left to experience--no more goals. I should hope that there there will always be ways for me to grow and that there always will be more goals beyond the ones I have reached. That's living to me, and I don't want to stop.

Well said.

Happiness is completely relative. Of course, if you want to be picky, basically everything is relative, but let's not go into that abstract realm. Happiness is defined literally as "good fortune; pleasure; contentment; joy." Many people confuse contentment with being so satisfied with your current state that you don't want to leave it, even to progress beyond it. But it is merely satisfaction with yourself and the way things are, and not necessarily an unwillingness to go beyond.

As "My Dreams" has said, it is both a temporary state of emotion as well as an outlook on life. You can experience something that brings you happiness (and, coincidentally, you can choose just how happy you are about it, which I'm sure most emo kids will disagree with :P) and you can also be the optimist - choose repeatedly to find the brighter side of things. The only difference between something temporary, such as an emotion, and something continual, such as an outlook, is the continuation of the temporary thing. A dot becomes a line becomes a picture becomes a gallery becomes a building, that sort of thing. The difference is simply where you choose to stop.

Jam it back in, in the dark.