The World I Want To live In

I'm not sure if "deserving" happiness is the best way to think about it. I'd ask yourself, what is achieved by forgoing happiness in your life? Does it make the situation of people in your area better if you are not happy? If you are happy, does it make the situation of suffering people in your areaworse?

In a way, it's a very self-centered idea that martyring ourselves (even emotionally) will make everyone else's life better. People who worry about surviving the trip to the market are totally and completely unaffected by whether you allow yourself to be happy. To think that feeling miserable is a moral response to the suffering of others is to buy into a weird mix of low self-esteem and high self-importance: your misery does nothing to alleviate other's suffering.

If the real importance of the question is not about what you "deserve" to feel, but rather whether it's morally or ethically acceptable to take actions that will make yourself happy at the expense of potentially taking actions that will make you less happy but could increase the happiness of others--well, that's a tougher question. First, I'd want to know whether making yourself happy really comes at the expense of doing something to make someone else happy. (If you forgo a nice vacation because other people in the world are suffering, it isn't really that your vacation comes at the expense of others in the world who are suffering. See above paragraph: people everywhere are wrapped up in their own lives, and the personal experiences of one person very very rarely have any sort of effect on others perceptions of their own situation.) Second, if *you* have no right to happiness when others suffer, then what right do people have to happiness when you aren't happy? That line of thinking, taken to its logical conclusion, would imply that the best world is where no one deserves happiness. That's not a world I want to live in, and I doubt it's the sort of world that you really want either.