To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

Something unearned is harder to enjoy than people expect. Comfort that arrived without effort tends to sit uneasily, because part of the pleasure in anything good is the sense that you had a hand in it and could produce it again. That is a claim about how satisfaction works rather than a rule about who deserves what.

Plenty of good fortune is luck and plenty of hard work goes unrewarded, so this is no scoreboard. Where you can, put something of yourself into the good things you already have. Contribution is what converts possession into enjoyment.