There are days when I am more happy, and days whan I am less happy. I can imagine having those good days more frequently, or less frequently. For example during vacation I usually mostly have the good days. Since most of my unhappiness comes from various smaller and greater frustrations at work, I believe that e.g. winning a lottery could improve my life significantly. (There are also other possible solution I could think of; the lottery is just an easy example.)
If I could have more autonomy about how I spend my days, and if I would be rational enough to spend a lot of that time with people I like, I believe I would be genuinely happy on a day-to-day basis.
My impression is that for a lot of people, much of their unhappiness comes from things that happen at work (and from the mere fact of having to do it at all). And yet the available evidence suggests that winning a big lottery prize doesn't typically make people all that much happier.
An obvious explanation is that we get annoyed whenever anything fails to go as we hope it will, and giving up work just means that instead of being frustrated by random inconveniences at work you'd be similarly frustrated by random inconveniences on your yacht, or wherever you ...
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