The flow of happiness

Lately, someone asked me what I think happiness is. I had forgotten that once I had written a blog about it, but essentially my answer was the same as what I had written there, although from a different perspective. Therefore I think it is worth writing about it again, instead of simply referring to that old blog.
I assume that many people see happiness as a state. As a positive subjective feeling that is as if time stops but that nonetheless feels lasting eternally. Or also as having something very pleasant. Being together with your love or having enough money for a good life are examples of these forms of happiness. Happiness can then be seen as a goal, something you can strive for, and following Aristotle and others it is the highest goal in life and also a goal with an end in itself. Other goals are intermediate goals to becoming happy, even though often we don’t see it that way.
It is not so that I want to reject this view on happiness. We set goals and once we have achieved them, we feel happy; maybe even happier than before. Nevertheless, I think that in essence happiness is something different and that these cases are actually special moments of happiness like the stills from a film. Following Alfred Schütz (1899-1959), one of the founders of the interpretive approach in sociology, I think that we must see life not as a series of connected moments, that linked together make up life, but it is just the other way round: Life is a stream of activities that is continuously monitored by an actor and that is only interrupted by this actor for moments of reflection, when there is a need to do so. As Giddens says it somewhere (p.82), paraphrasing Schütz’s idea: “[O]nly in rare circumstances does a person have a clear-cut ‘end’ in mind which organizes his energies unequivocally in one direction … One’s life-activity does not consist in strung-out series of discrete purposes and projects, but in a continuing stream of purposive activity in interaction with others and with the world of nature.” Following this view, I see life as a stream of activities that you perform automatically, without thinking and often even unconsciously. Occasionally the stream is interrupted by moments of thinking, reflection, and looking back, when the stream stagnates, i.e. when problems arise that require a solution or when something happens that you want to give attention to for one reason or another. Such moments don’t need to be special, but they can also be “insignificant” like the question what to eat today.
What does this mean for the idea of happiness? Assuming that the view of life as a stream of activities is correct, happiness then is the feeling that the stream of life streams in a satisfying and pleasant way. Or rather, happiness doesn’t refer to the stream of life as such but to the flow of the stream. It is the steadily, smoothly and continuously going on of the stream. Following the stream of life unconsciously and without feeling the need to give it special attention gives a sense of happiness. Inattentively? Continuously? Sometimes it pops up in our mind that the stream is flowing, not because the stream stagnates but for positive reasons. Sometimes there are moments in the stream of life we wants to pay special attention to, like the feeling of being together with our love or having enough money for a good life; moments of happiness.