Happiness is just a notion for some people. Like any state or feeling, happiness can be educated, pleasures too. A properly functioning of the psyche and interdependently, of the physical, also depend on pleasures.
No kids would be created if this were not a pleasurable action. Or at least we wouldn’t have created it until now. Pleasures can be oral, genital and anal. That is if we exclude tactile or auditory pleasures. Or, last but not least, intellectual.
For some happiness can mean harming someone, causing pain. For others, pleasure may mean eating something tasty, something sweet. Or drink something.
For others pleasure comes down to making love or sex to the extent that these two terms can be differentiated because there is some difference. Love implies gentleness, tenderness, and sex implies action itself, only converging the sexes.
Anal pleasures are also pleasures. It is the pleasure not only of homosexuals, but also of normal people in terms of sexual orientation. When a person defecates, he feels some pleasure because he relieves himself. As long this no longer becomes pleasurable, in the moment urination or defecation ceases to be pleasurable, the process stops, and succumbing occurs.
Pleasures are interdependent and can influence each other. Genital pleasure is the best known and involves urination and sex. Having sex is as normal as can be.
Tactile pleasures come from the tactile sensors and are the most sensitive. This can mean something pleasant to the touch, for example a pleasant breeze. Auditory pleasures are intellectual processes and intellectual pleasures, depending on how the brain translates words and sounds into the intellect. We cannot deny the connection between feeling and intellect. We write motivated by love, or by hate, or other sentimental motivations, just as we can hate, or love motivated by intellectual education.
Deep down in our soul, we humans are all peasants, farmers, hunters, who bring prey or food to the family or children. This is how we are built since the time of the tribes and social communities that are precursor of the advanced civilizations.
Happiness as I said is dependent on pleasure. Pleasure can be educated. It is not necessary that the pleasure derives from the food, but it can have as a precursor the intellect, the feeling…the soul or a combination of these.
Pleasure is a chemically complicated process. Apparently, it depends on one or more hormones, such as serotonin. The release of serotonin, a pleasure hormone, can be achieved in several ways. A strange one, is the pain itself. Hence sadism or sado-masochism.
For this reason, for some people pleasure can be obtained from so-called normal things, for example from heat, warm water, comfort. For others pleasure is obtained from cold showers, discomfort, physical pain. Maybe mental too.
For each person pleasure and happiness can mean something else. Happiness is not really the pleasure of the moment. Happiness is a long-lasting state. Happiness can be protected by beliefs that are not about material things but about reason and feeling. In this way, without good and warm food, without heat, without luxury, without comfort, we will still be happy. In this sense, even the Christian dogma guides us, telling us that we can be rich, but not to depends on wealth.