A Happy Person

Excerpt from Making Sense by Sam Harris (David Deutsch):

I think we're more characterized by our problems than by our particular ideas at one time. A happy person is somebody who has a set of hard problems that are interesting enough to be worth devoting a lot of effort to, and yet not so hard that they can't make any progress toward solving them. 

Later in the chapter he goes on to say:

Pleasure isn't joy. People can be trained by our culture, and by their circumstances, to interpret pleasure as joy if they haven't experienced much joy. But pleasure doesn't fulfill the same function in the mind. And it's particularly insidious because when you first experience, say, heroin, it might well be joy, because you're undergoing a new experience, a new way of being, new sensations, and that's interesting and therefor can be fun and joyful. But once you are doing this every day and it's your way of life, it gives you nothing. And if you nevertheless interpret that "nothing" as "good," well, that's like being dead. It's not a human state of mind. 

Then, Deutsch talks about being entertained: 

By the way, there's a concept of being entertained by other people, or heroin, or by TV programs, or whatever. That's a mistake. We may subjectively interpret what's happening as being entertained by something, but really the only thing that entertains us is our own creative engagement with it. Without that creative engagement, nothing can entertain us. Think about the cliche of winning the lottery and ending up miserable. The generic trap you can fall into in this situation is thinking money can entertain you, not realizing that only you can entertain you.

Harris immediately adds to this: 

I agree with you that most people think the opposite of being entertained is being bored. But boredom, in my experience, is nothing more than a lack of attention.