Happier

I recently re-read 'Happier' by Tal Ben Shahar, an amazing book. One learning from the book is that to achieve lasting happiness, we need both pleasure and purpose. Either one alone is not sufficient to make us happy.

Imagine you won an all-expenses-paid vacation at a resort of your choice, valid as long as you stayed put. Sure, this sounds pleasurable, but how long would it be before you got bored and started to yearn for something to do?  At the other end of the spectrum, consider the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. A number of them developed a purpose - to survive the ordeal, one day at a time. By no stretch of imagination could we believe that they were happy. But imagine that you have found your calling, say teaching or working for the underprivileged, and you actually enjoy what you do, it is very likely that you find life quite fulfilling. If we can find a purpose in life and we enjoy the work required to get us there, then we might have found the holy grail of happiness.

The author sums it up well. A life with neither pleasure nor purpose would be nihilistic.
Pleasure without purpose suggests hedonism. Purpose without pleasure might be symptomatic of someone caught in a rat race. Pleasure and purpose together, in the same person at the same time, that's where you want to be.