What internal and external factors influence our happiness? I will answer this question in this article. Before we begin, I will give my definition of the terms that I will use in this article. Responsibility - the ability to be responsible for one’s manifestations outside and to oneself. Phenomenon - manifestations aimed at contact with oneself and the environment. Resistance - unconscious phenomena that limit contact with oneself and the surrounding reality. Need is a psychological and physiological state of a person aimed at establishing and maintaining the balance of the body at a given moment in time. Happiness is a state that lasts over time due to the emergence of needs for self-realization, psychological and physical balance and their satisfaction. Some of us are familiar with the situation when outwardly everything is fine, there is a well-paid job, a car, a family, a house and all the attributes of a happy life, in the generally accepted understanding of the word, but a person cannot say that he is happy. What's the matter? Let's figure it out. Our contact with ourselves and the surrounding reality is influenced by many factors that contribute to whether we consider ourselves happy or not. As a rule, this is our past experience, social standards and rules of the environment in which we live and “internal deafness” to ourselves, to our inner world. Most of us strive for a positive assessment of society, approval of our merits and achievements which we have achieved or We want to achieve, in terms of material benefits and benefits, the approval of a “socially acceptable candy wrapper.” In our time of abundance and consumption, we have learned well to satisfy the needs for food and physical safety, but we have completely forgotten about our inner world and psychological safety, replacing it with the entourage of the material world. Why is this happening? When we are raised, a program for our future life is put into us; we absorb, yes, we absorb, but we do not process those patterns of behavior that are acceptable for those who raise us. Our future behavior is also influenced by our ideas about life under the influence of the reality and events that happen around us, forcing us to live in the external, rather than the internal world. The constant rush to obtain socially acceptable approval, imaginary emotions, ephemeral happiness forces us to live with models and ideas about our lives invented for us; we doom ourselves to walk in a circle of unreality and fantasies. We stop living by our true needs, and live by what our consumer society offers us. Excessive pressure of circumstances dictates the rules of the game in this world. A person is faced with the choice of either walking in the crowd like everyone else without the ability to move independently or resist and be himself. Most of us are “children of our society” who shift responsibility for themselves and their lives to their environment, allowing themselves and their desires to be controlled, which is the worst thing, forcing them to satisfy their needs only in the way that is offered by the external, and not the internal, world of a person . An intelligent zombie, this is the definition I would give to a person of our time. Let's think about whether the benefits of the material world can save us from the emotional experiences that we experience during periods of loss or disappointment, during periods of mental anguish and suffering, the obvious answer is no. All that material well-being can do is cover our inner world with a veil of imaginaryness and lead us away from the truth of what is happening. Let's look at everything using the example of pets. A socially prosperous family gets a pet, or one of the seven members wants and gets a pet, it doesn’t matter which one. Why does he do this in a prosperous family? One of the options is fashionable, interesting, prestigious. The second option is to receive what cannot be obtained from the social environment and in particular from family members. In the first case, the pet will soon be forgotten and, as is often the case, given away.