When does "happy" count?

I was driving home from work today, listening to Charles Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" on CD. (Hey, I've got a half-hour long commute each direction.)

It's a fun listen, except true to British fashion, they have to do things the right way. Instead of having some guy with an over-developed accent reading the book, which would have been well and good, it's got several actors playing the parts, complete with sound effects. I keep looking out my windshield, trying to see the oncoming horse and carriage.

Two characters were arguing in only the way English can argue. I'll try to paraphrase it.
"You're the most good-natured person I know. You'd be great at running the Blue Lagoon pub."
"I can't run the Blue Lagoon pub. It would be so easy to be happy there."
"Pardon?"
"No, I need to be a grave digger, or perhaps a jailer, in order for it to count that I'm happy."

The concept gave me pause. Does happiness ever not count? Take Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. They have everything - beautiful homes, children, all the money in the world, philanthropic causes that mean a lot to them. They're ostensibly happy. But does that count? What do they want for? Of course they're happy! Isn't the very definition of unhappy "wanting for something"?

Can we just be happy, regardless of where we are, what we're doing, who we're with, who we are?

I think we can be happy, and I think there is a bonafide reason why we usually aren't: we are a nation of addicts. What causes happiness on one day is not enough the next. Feeling the dewy grass between your bare toes turns into needing to feel the wind through your hair while you ride your bicycle (illegally helmet-less), which turns into needing a car for your 16th birthday, which turns into needing a job, then needing the best college, then needing a job better than the ones your parents worked their whole lives at...where does it end?

In the grass. Only this time we're not feeling it between our toes - we're lying underneath.