Deirdre McCloskey believes it's important for happiness to be real:
Suppose you could experience any life you wanted, such as a combination of Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth and Billie Jean King, with happy endings sprinkled all around. I mean that you would feel you had experienced it, in all the grittiness of daily life, with its pleasures and its suitably modified pains. Would you do it? Let’s make it tougher than [philosopher Robert Nozick] did: After being hitched up to the machine for half an hour in which all life is experience, the actual you dies. Would you take it? No, of course not.
You would if you could experience alternative and "happier" lives as though going to a movie or reading a novel, and then go home. That’s why movies and novels are life lessons, for better or worse. But, unless you were about to die anyway, such experiential, pot-of-pleasure, 1-2-3 "happiness" is not something for which you would trade your actual, admittedly somewhat crummy and often extremely painful life. The cherishing of your life is part of true happiness, and it comes with consciousness.
The Dish 