Franz Kafka once said that happiness consists in having an ideal and not progressing towards it. If you did progress towards it, you'd be unhappy because you'd never be able to reach it. You can incrementally improve your life, but you never quite experience the glamour. You never quite get to your utopia, or whatever it is. And once you realize that you can be quite Buddhist about it, and say, "Well, okay, I'm just going to keep detached from it all."