Decoupling happiness from state of the world: Useful? Against human nature? I'm currently reading the book "Happiness - a guide to developing life's most important skill" by Matthieu Ricard (my first real contact with buddhism/buddhist philosophy). I found the argument he makes in the beginning of the book rather interesting - that we draw "happiness" from the physical state of the world, e.g. a dinner in a fine restaurant, spending quality time with friends, etc., but that this happiness also vanishes as soon as the life situation changes - the dinner is at some point over, the friends have to leave, ..., and our happiness level decreases. Instead, he proposes to pursue happiness from within, irrespective of our current situation (as well as by helping others).

While I find this thought intriguing, as he tells tales of concentration camp survivors or people being tortured that are nevertheless light-hearted and seemingly happy despite great calamities in their life, the more I think about it the more I doubt the practicality of this approach. As per Kant, the maxim of your actions must be generalizable into the basis of a new set of laws (sorry for the bad translation here) - but I feel like human lust for short-term pleasure has advanced mankind in incredible ways throughout human history. We want to go somewhere far, but we are lazy, so we invented cars and planes to take us there without any effort in a fraction of the time it would take us to walk. We want to eat delicious meals, so we advanced the art of cooking, we want to be in contact with our family and friends, so we invented the phone and other media, the list goes on and on.

My question is: Is it really desirable to completely erase this natural laziness and "hedonic treadmill" that makes humans pursue money and fame? Of course there are also bad sides to technology or extreme egoism, but I'm not convinced this calls for a complete erasure of this "primal urge".

The book is of course written from a (presumably) Tibetan perspective, my insight into the different schools of thought is very limited, apologies if this is not the right place.
This is a very well known sentiment in Buddhist circles. The canonical metaphor for this is "leather shoes" -- you can't cover all earth in leather but you can cover your feet.

There are certainly two paths, and you're right that the path of least resistance in following our greed for ease and comfort has brought us to all these great inventions. The question is, are we psychologically more satisfied than we were in old times? The quality of life has improved without doubt, but do we feel better? (and do we feel better specifically due to that, or could there be something else going on hand in hand)

It would be a truism to say that lovers are happy in hovel and that the rich also cry. These days people in affected ethnic neighborhoods probably enjoy higher basic living standards than the elite in medieval times. Do they feel happier?

In Buddhism, happiness/suffering depends on a match between "is" and "should", or your perception of the situation on one hand and your expectations on the other. If the two mismatch, one will feel unhappy no matter how good the situation is, objectively. In other words, Buddhism defines happiness as a mental/emotional state conditional on one's values ("attachments").

So the Buddhist way of making "the leather shoes" for the mind, is to learn to transcend any fixed idea of the world, as well as any fixed set of expectations, and learn to dive into the spontaneity of life as is, with infinite openness and no sense of conflict. This is subjectively experienced as acceptance (aka love) of oneself and the world, or the perfect ease and spontaneity. This stateless state of having no ego, no fixed position, and therefore no suffering, is what we call Nirvana, and the Christians call unity with God.

Is it desirable to have entire population of Earth to get into this state of spontaneous freedom and what would happen to society and the very civilization? Until I experienced it first-hand I used to think that civilization would die out from the lack of activity. Now I have all reasons to believe that once the mind lets go of its conceptual boundaries, it gets to see that the nature of reality is not as fixed as we used to believe. So, in my opinion, when we are all free, instead of dying out the civilization will enter a phase of increased playfulness and creativity. Instead of being victims in our collective nightmares, we will be dreaming our own dreams, collectively and individually. I want to be around when that happens.