Happiness?

We optmize over happiness so much, even though it doesn't depend only on our actions. Everything looks so relative and the mind constantly searches for new stimulations and covering up the earlier screw-ups. The more I try to think, more is the prevailing confusion to understand the underlying patterns of anything that exists. Everything till now was driven by herd mentality and now with an open ended entry into the big bad world, there is no anchor and ship is tossing around randomly.

A simple story gives a complete correlation. A man was sitting in a desert. He saw water at the horizon. He became happy (this is the root cause of his problem :P). He started walking. He walked for half an hour, but the water body still seemed to be at the horizon. He actually kept on walking for a few more hours but still the water seemed far away. Now comes the foolish part. The mind gets attracted only to find water there and lose the understanding of it being a mirage. He kept on walking in that direction for days. Cheated by a wrong ideal and completely succumbing to the irrational chase of desire, finally he crashed down like a loser.