In the story “The ones who walk away from omelas”, the city of Omela happiness is dependent on a childs suffering. Happiness is so subjective. Happiness comes in different forms. However, it has one common denominator-Love. Love what you do and you will find joy, which in turn develops happiness. The only time you pay for happiness, is if the price if your happiness is at the expense of another person's sadness.
I believe that everything is balance and symmetry. In order for happiness to exist, there must be a complimenting or contrast for comparison. To know happiness, you must know sadness. In order to feel sadness you must know there is happiness to long for. Your joy is the absence of your sorrow. Just as your sorrow is the absence of your joy, or whatever brought you joy. We know goodness as goodness, only because we know evil. If there was no night, how would we ever conceive of naming daylight? Day and night, wrong and right, up and down, good and bad are all two halves of a whole like yin and yang. Neither can exist without the other and each exists because of the other. They exist together as one, or not at all.
It is also simply the fact that anyone can see others around them who are happy or happier, and realize that they are not. People can live contently under the poorest, harshest conditions as long as that is the only condition they know of. It is when they know about or live among people who have better or more than they have, that they start to want. Then in some cases they realize that they "don't have enough". You can't feel deprived of something that no one has. There must be a basis of comparison.
It does not matter how many people are sad vs. how many people are happy. Each individual's capacity for emotion and thought is perfectly balanced. The two halves are never divided so no one person has the good half and another has the bad half. The two halves are inseparable, existing within each of us always equal in proportion to each other....