At the end of the day, to avoid pain is to avoid happiness. (They are opposite forces within the same function.) To numb ourselves to one side of our feeling capacity is to shut down everything. It leaves us chasing the kind of empty happiness that never really fills us and leaves us shells of the people we are really destined to be.
We believe that “happiness” is the sustained state of feeling “good.”
It is because of this belief that we are not happy. Happy people are not people who “feel good” all the time; they are the people who are able to be guided by their negative emotions rather than paralyzed by them.