Ask most people what happiness is & you'll get some version of the same answer: it's getting what you want. The marks, the mates, the money, the body, the life. Get the thing, feel the feeling.
We think that's exactly backwards. Happiness isn't getting what you want. It's not wanting anything more than what's already here.
The treadmill
Here's the most reliable finding in the whole science of happiness: your desires rise with your gains. New phone feels incredible for a week, then it's just your phone. The goalposts move the moment you reach them. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. Your son lives on the fastest version of it ever built - a feed that manufactures a new "missing" every eight seconds, then sells him the cure.
You can't outrun a treadmill. You step off it.
The default state
Happiness exists when you remove the sense of something missing. It's the default state - the world just buries it.
Nobody teaches a little kid to be happy. They just are, until the comparing starts. Which means the job isn't to build happiness in a teenager - it's to dig it back out from under everything the world stacked on top. That's a different job. A much more doable one.
This is not an argument against ambition
Big one, this. Wanting to build things, get stronger, chase a goal - that's direction, & direction is healthy. The poison is wanting-as-deficit: I'll be okay when... You can go hard at a goal & be fully happy on the way. The building isn't a bid to become happy. It's what happy people do with their energy.
& a word of care: if your son is in real pain right now, "just choose happiness" is the worst sentence in the English language. That's not what this is. Bad seasons are real - we call them the blues, & you can't have the greens without them. This is about what he's aiming at on the other side.
Why we call ourselves a factory
Our whole mission is creating happier humans. Not humans who got everything they wanted - humans who want the life they're actually in, & build from there. A mentor doesn't hand a teenager happiness. He models it: someone a few years ahead who's excited by today & doesn't feel like he needs anything. That's the most contagious thing a young man can carry.