Just to clarify my stance first: I don't think of "optimizing happiness" should be a life goal. I think happiness should be a byproduct that you got when achieving your life goal.
And I agree with everything you said. For the sentence that you quote, my point was, for certain people who try to always feel content (in other words, aiming for local maxima) in their life, without explicitly having any other life goal of unlocking their potential or making X million dollars or starting a big company, putting themselves through a local minima for a long stretch of time would be hard to pay off. That was just meant to be an observation of an extreme case (optimizing happiness/your feeling of happiness at expense of everything else, as opposed to striving for a goal at expense of your own feeling). Since most of us would be somewhere in between rather than either extremes, we would have to go through local minima at varying degrees.
I'm not waiting for some magic words to start my marathon - but I just thought that there would be some magic words that will help me justify the run to others, and to myself (also serve as enhancement to make you run faster!).
And I agree with everything you said. For the sentence that you quote, my point was, for certain people who try to always feel content (in other words, aiming for local maxima) in their life, without explicitly having any other life goal of unlocking their potential or making X million dollars or starting a big company, putting themselves through a local minima for a long stretch of time would be hard to pay off. That was just meant to be an observation of an extreme case (optimizing happiness/your feeling of happiness at expense of everything else, as opposed to striving for a goal at expense of your own feeling). Since most of us would be somewhere in between rather than either extremes, we would have to go through local minima at varying degrees.
I'm not waiting for some magic words to start my marathon - but I just thought that there would be some magic words that will help me justify the run to others, and to myself (also serve as enhancement to make you run faster!).