Can the search for happiness be the meaning and purpose of life?

Deep within the mind, we understand our lives as the story of a hero’s journey: a story in which we leave the known world, enter the unknown, discover, and return to the known in order to expand it. This is the story underlying stories and the most fundamental story at the heart of myths.
Bringing this story from an archetypal level deep in the psyche—where it remains unarticulated and unconscious—into consciousness changes how we see the world and what we understand as its meaning.

We continually experience suffering and sorrow partly because of a mistaken understanding of the meaning of life. We continually demand order from the world, yet the world does not work in this way. Chaos always arrives as a powerful force and can overcome order.
The problem with making happiness the object of life is that it can be destroyed at any moment by the arrival of chaos. But we can change the goal of life in our minds from the pursuit of happiness to the hero’s journey and adventure. At every moment we then enter an adventure that moves from the known into the unknown, and the world confronts us with chaos that must be overcome. This changes the entire structure of life. We find ourselves as heroes who, at every moment, stand at the boundary between known and unknown, ready to accept suffering and step into the unknown in order to discover a new world. The archetypal pattern of the mind is not the pursuit of happiness but movement from the known to the unknown. A deep understanding of this can bring happiness, yet such happiness is not the goal of life but the result of growth that has taken place.

Video link from the YouTube channel “Steps in Illumination”:
https://youtu.be/8fMYoCyfICI