Item: 1 square of happy-face wrapping paper

Thinking more about happiness, I'm also aware of how it is or is commonly believed to be subjective.  That is, it sometimes appears from the outside that a claim of happiness is being used as a sort of defense or excuse.  If a person tells me they're happy, it's supposed to be unassailable.  Who am I to tell them they're not really happy?  And yet there's a propensity to, if not deflate it, at least to question the presence of happiness in other people.

I know lots of people who would say something like what I said a couple of nights ago - that yes, their life is not perfect, they have problems, but they're problems that they can live with.  It's very difficult not to point out the obvious deficiencies in someone's life, or ask questions.  Why are you sacrificing X for Y?  Do you not see where this path is leading you?  Why have you given up on Z?  What do you mean you're happy with the way things are?  Why aren't you fixing this?  Somehow it's hard not to want to drive others toward perfection.

But such remarks can be discounted by the listener because happiness is supposed to be measured by the person possessing it, which is how it should be, right?  Here in the US we all have the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.  Other people don't get to decide what that is.  To turn the whole thing around, people have their own opinions about my life, too.  I can even supply some of the most common ones:

-why aren't you publishing stuff?
-why don't you have a boyfriend?
-why haven't you had knee surgery?

In other words, you can look at a person and think You're not happy; you're just lazy.  It's harder than you'd think to tell the difference.