Cracking the happiness formula does not seem such a difficult task after all. What is happiness if not the greatest possible number of fulfilled desires? Human desires are facts of people’s inner lives. Their fulfillment is a fact of the world. The point is to find a way to bring these two facts together. Let us call it a technical problem that seems to require only skill and a bit of luck.

However, since ancient times, the wisest men and women of all civilizations have warned people against this way of looking at the question, branding it as a form of self-delusion. There is something, in fact, in the very structure of human desire, which seems to prevent individuals who are in search of happiness from passing from a temporary sense of satisfaction to true fulfillment. Generally, their final advice was as follows: find a firmer anchor in your lives, by distinguishing the goods that have a special, essential worth from those that have only an apparent, superficial value. But how do you recognize this special value when you encounter it?

In my talk, I will try to give a name to the personal experience of contact with such a special good. Its name is: “resonance”.