Everything worth having is moral. That is to say, you can obtain pleasure or satisfy the ego but such a path is not one that ends in happiness. What composes a meaningful life is the way we relate well to what we encounter in this strange world: family, friends, meaningful achievement, purpose. Yet it is also the discovery of many that nothing actual will satisfy you. Life is Sisyphean, each hill must have another hill, or else cease at the futility of the struggle. No thing or person takes you beyond the condition of time, the apparent meaninglessness of the material world we have come to believe we inhabit. Instead what we seem to long for are the very abstractions of the desires we seek: love, beauty, goodness. These abstractions are only made possible by the fact that we are conscious, by the fact that there is a you that can internally represent the relation of particular desire to the abstraction that it vessels.
The recognition that happiness is not the love of things but the realisation of love itself, is the path sought by the strands existent in most religious traditions we tend to refer to as mysticism. Indeed, it is at the centre of many of the worlds religious ideas. Here we stumble. Religion is a word so burdened we have to begin by picking up some of the dusty rubble in order to clear our way.
