I've always thought of it as:

Happiness = Experiences - Expectations

So greater happiness requires either better experiences or lowered expectations. Guess which is generally easier to gin up.

Of late I've thought more in terms of contentment rather than happiness. Contentment is super low expectations -- feeling un-entitled to much of anything -- such that your experiences are generally automatically sufficient, almost no matter what they are.

I read a book by a Brit transplanted to Denmark, trying to understand why Denmark is generally regarded as "the happiest country". He said it's not really happiness, it's contentment. Denmark has always been a small country with modest prospects. A Dane is happy if he has a job, a wife, and maybe a weekend beach cabin. His society is relatively classless to begin with so he seldom feels inadequate. He hasn't got much to worry about because education and healthcare are taken care of -- assuming you don't insist on going to the most prestigious university in Europe or something. Low requirements, low expectations = contentment.

But as the meme suggests, the delusions of religion pump up your expectations into the stratosphere: I'm god's special snowflake! He cares what I eat for breakfast and where I put my tallywhacker! He protects me and blesses me! I'm going to live with him in a mansion in the sky forever! And then when actual reality and the creeping realization on some level that the mansion on gold-plated streets isn't real all catch up with you, what a fall that is. Just about guarantees unhappiness.

So if you are always expecting to get tortured you should be happy. Hm... I don't believe this equation is right as it is but there is definitely some truth to be found here. Is there a reason why Elon Musk on JRE is the background? Did they state the equation perhaps?