Everyone is looking for happiness. All over facebook people are playing the game of "look at this - I'm happy", and this is somehow good... presumably better than sad. We take this completely for granted, like wi-fi, but actually it's a very strange thing which is totally unique to the tiny slice of time we inhabit.
Let me be more clear. The idea that being happy is good, to be pursued, and being sad is bad, is not a universal human thing - at all. It is probably as recent as 9-5 jobs, or at least big agriculture.
If you look at older times in history, or indigenous cultures, you don't find such emphasis on people questing for happiness, or trying to repair sadness. If you look at their myths and cultural stories - no-one is pursuing happiness. They pursue physical safety, power, honour, restoring balance to natural forces, people to breed with. Happiness is just a boring side-effect of your world being roughly in natural order.
The quest for happiness is really is a uniquely modern thing. It got caused as we started to get lifestyle choices. Pre-industrial people didn't really have lifestyle choices. But now, people could offer us choices. (Incidentally for those interested in anthropology, the Buddha was born right at the time where a middle-class of free merchants started to exist).
When you try to convince someone to want something, you need to tell them that their state of being will be improved by it. So there you go, the appropriation of temporary happiness as some kind murky indicator that your life is better.
And I'm not talking just about consumerism here, it's more the birth of the idea that we have any right to be happy, or any choice to be happy.
Now, as soon as you do this - as soon as you start to have some belief systems which tell you that happy is better than sad - then you have given birth to depression. Depression is the unwillingness to be sad, which can take various twisted and cyclic forms, depending how bad it is.
From as soon as our kids exist, we feed them images and stories which portray loss and sadness as a bad thing (e.g. Disney). Same with mainstream entertainment, adults consume a diet of emotional-junk food with happy endings. Then we wonder why so many people are depressed. That's the thing with cultures, it's hard for us to see the hidden assumptions we are making which are actually causing our problems.
And therefore even our spirituality is utterly infected with this idea that it is meant to improve your emotional life in any way. When you look at old spiritual teachings, there is simply no emphasis on improving one's emotional well-being life. People in the old days had all the same "psychological" problems - guilt, low-self-worth, jealousy, chips-on-shoulders... and no-one tried to make them feel any better. This is why it worked...!
Hippies, yogis, singing in circles or spiritual songs to feel good - this is not practice! The purpose of devotional practice is to break the heart, to learn to love in a way which is painful, futile, insane - and free.
I wish I had something useful to say, but I don't. I don't even have a practice for you. All I can say is everytime you notice yourself wanting to feel better, stop, and watch some David Attenborough, the hard shit, where some baby animals die in a very beautiful yet sad struggle for existence (in HD). And know that this is the Perfection of Life.
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