Learning to live from genuine happiness requires first seeing what blocks it. One of the major blocks is our deeply rooted sense of entitlement. In fact, this is a big part of the “problem” of happiness: we firmly believe that we should be happy. We think it’s our right, and consequently, we feel entitled to it, even if we’re not clear what happiness is, except to feel good. This expectation can have many faces. For example, we often feel entitled to good health, expecting that we can and should be able to stay youthful and physically fit. When life comes along to greet us with illness or injury we can easily sink into a stupor of frustration and even despair. Sometimes just get­ting a cold will trigger our anxieties over losing control and feeling powerless. This sense of entitlement — which basically says that life should go the way we want and expect it to go — even tells us we shouldn’t have to experience discomfort. Then, when we do experience discomfort, we feel that some­thing is wrong; we might get angry and feel it’s unfair, or we may feel sorry for ourselves.

Ezra Bayda, Beyond Happiness