New theistic chew toys wanted!

[Spongebob]

Well, from one perspective, happiness is among the benefits of Buddhistic enlightenment. The Four Noble Truths lay out a path to escape suffering. Inasmuch as happiness becomes possible once one is no longer suffering (and one may argue that non-suffering is a kind of happiness)... you could say that Buddhism is concerned with happiness.

That's consistent with my understanding.  Happiness isn't so much a goal, rather a fortunate outcome.

I disagree. Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus all saw happiness as some kind of fundamental good, or at least as a product of good living (as did many other ancient thinkers).

That's my lack of knowledge of the ancients.  I admit I haven't studied ancient philosophers nearly enough.  What little I have learned seems to be a determination to to find truth and justice.  After the fall of Rome and medieval feudalism took hold, life was very different.  In some ways the inhabitants of the ancient and classical world understood things that the medieval world forgot.  Of course for the average person in any of those periods, life would likely hold very little opportunity for the examination of happiness.  But for the great thinkers such concepts were within reach.

But still, in the modern world there are thousands of books published, TV shows, podcasts, countless songs and careers of tens of thousands of therapists, all devoted to this thing we call "happiness".  It's an obsession.  What I have learned about history tells me that this level of pursuit has never occurred in recorded history and what we mean by happiness may be very different from what anyone in the past was thinking.

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Bolding mine.

What are you defining as happiness? Because I do consider the things you mentioned to be happiness.

I put happiness on a scale AND consider it a fluctuating state that comes and goes. I can have a miserable job situation, getting abuse from customers, working with people I dislike. Yet I can consider myself happy not only over all, because of a measure of tolerance for bad situations (there's a difference between feeling stressed and emotionally abused by your workplace and just feeling unfulfilled by it in different aspects; the latter can make me uncomfortable but I can tolerate not liking my job in that way whereas the former would be the line where I'd define myself as consistently unhappy). But I can also find happiness states in moments. Like the security that comes from being able to pay bills and live without worrying so much. The occasional customer relationships where I feel like I'm making a difference or the regulars who know me and seek me out that make all the bad/rude ones vanish from my mind. I can have good moments offwork that bring me peace and fulfillment (sometimes a job is just a job. Not everything you do for work will satisfy your ambitions and dreams and you can have those things fulfilled outside of work).

So, it's a scale, of these small moments of happiness and pleasure in life adding up to an overall definition of each day collectively. But the state isn't permanent. And it is also defined by the absence of harsher situations and pain, which are also on a scale(like, a bad day here and there is not going to tip the scale even if those bad days are really terrible and make me unhappy for the whole day in question).

This is why I said it was difficult to define.  Happiness is not an exact concept.  Is the absence of suffering "happiness"?  Perhaps to some.  Is it rather elation with life?  I'm not going to pretend to define it for anyone other than myself.