Introduction
Most writing on this subject cannot hear the question. It assumes you're in denial, addresses the denial, and never engages with what you actually said — which is that this is working for you, and that the distress belongs to other people.
That deserves a real answer rather than a lecture. Some of what follows will be uncomfortable. None of it is an attempt to correct you into agreement.
Start With What's True in It
Adults get to make choices about their own lives, including ones that shorten them. People do this constantly — with food, with risk, with work, with sport — and we don't generally require them to justify it.
There is no rule that everyone must find substance use unhappy. The assumption that all use is secretly miserable is inaccurate, moralizing, and it's part of why people don't trust the people telling them to stop.
And you know your own experience better than anyone reading it from outside. If you say the last three years have contained real happiness, nobody is positioned to tell you that you're lying.
Now the Complications
Several, and they're not rhetorical tricks.
The assessment is being made from inside. You are evaluating your happiness using the instrument that the substance modifies. That's not an accusation. It's a structural problem with no clean solution, and it applies to everyone assessing anything they don't want to give up. But it means "I'm happy" is being reported by a system that is, in a specific and measurable sense, being adjusted.
Happiness and relief are hard to distinguish from within. A great deal of what feels like happiness in sustained use is the cessation of withdrawal — the ending of a discomfort that the substance itself produced. That is a genuine sensation of relief. Whether it's happiness is a different question, and it's not one you can answer by consulting how it feels, because relief feels wonderful.
The reward system is not reporting accurately. With repeated use, the machinery that generates wanting becomes more reactive while the machinery that generates liking flattens.1 This means people can experience an intense pull toward something they no longer particularly enjoy. If your use has escalated, it's worth asking whether you're chasing the pull or the pleasure — they diverge, and the divergence is invisible from inside.
"Others Don't" Is Doing Work
The second half of your title deserves attention.
Others don't. Which others, and why?
Some of the disapproval is stigma — the ambient view of addiction as moral failure, which is documented, widespread, and worth nothing as evidence about your life.
But some of the people who are unhappy about this are unhappy because they are bearing costs. The partner who lies awake. The child who is constructing an explanation. The friend who has taken your calls. Their distress may not be a judgment about your choices; it may be a report on their experience of them.
Those are different, and they cannot be dismissed with the same argument.
The Autonomy Claim Has a Boundary
Where "it's my life" stops being sufficient.
It holds while the consequences fall on you. It becomes weaker where they fall on people who did not choose it — the people who depend on you, who will find you, who will absorb the aftermath, who are children.
This is not moralizing. It's the same limit that applies to any other risky choice, and most people apply it to themselves without difficulty in other domains.
The Question Was Asked, and That's the Interesting Part
Something worth noticing without being goaded into a conclusion.
People who are unambivalently happy with an arrangement don't usually compose a defense of it. The question arrived because something prompted it — a moment, a comment, a private observation.
That doesn't prove anything. It's not a trap where asking means you're wrong. But the prompt is worth locating, because it's the only piece of evidence here that came from inside you rather than from anyone arguing.
What Would Change Your Mind?
A question worth putting to yourself, in private, with nobody arguing.
If the answer is nothing — if there is no fact, no consequence, no discovery that would alter your assessment — then this is not a conclusion you reached by weighing evidence. Unfalsifiable positions are held for other reasons, and it's worth knowing what yours are.
If there is an answer — a line you haven't crossed, a person you haven't hurt, a health finding you haven't received — then name it now, while you're calm, and write it down. Set the condition in advance rather than letting it move quietly as you approach it.
Thresholds that are never specified have a way of receding exactly as fast as you travel toward them.
Practical Things That Are True Regardless
If the answer is that you're continuing, some facts remain facts.
Tolerance drops during breaks and returning to a previous dose after one is a well-documented driver of overdose. Unregulated supply is inconsistent, including contamination with substances you didn't intend to take. Using alone is the single largest predictor of whether an overdose is survivable. Naloxone nasal spray is available over the counter, without prescription, in all fifty states.
None of that requires you to be unhappy. It requires only that you'd prefer to be alive.
The Bottom Line
You may be right about your own experience, and nobody is positioned to overrule it from outside. But the assessment is being made by a system the substance modifies, relief impersonates happiness convincingly, and wanting can outlive liking without announcing it. The autonomy argument holds where the costs are yours and weakens where they aren't. And if the answer is that this continues, then don't use alone, keep naloxone nearby, and remember that tolerance falls faster than you think.
Sources
- Wanting grows, liking flattens — Robinson TE, Berridge KC (1993). The neural basis of drug craving: an incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Brain Research Reviews, 18(3):247-291. See also Robinson & Berridge (2025), The Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction 30 Years On, Annual Review of Psychology 76:29-58. View source ↗