Offer someone their favourite meal, a meaningful compliment, and a sense of larger purpose, and something in each produces a genuinely different flavour of satisfaction, even though all three might loosely get filed under the same word: happiness.
There are, in fact, three distinct ways happiness gets sought, and telling them apart clears up a lot of confusion about why some pleasures fade fast while others don't.
The first is interest based, sensory pleasure moving through the five senses. This is real, and it matters, but it's inherently bounded. A favourite food moves from necessary and delightful, to merely tasteful, to tasteless, to eventually intolerable if pushed far enough. No amount of more delivers more satisfaction indefinitely.
The second is values based, happiness tasted through feelings inside a relationship: trust, respect, affection, gratitude, kindness. A parent instinctively attending to a distressed child before finishing their own meal isn't making a sacrifice in the way it might look from outside. They're tasting a different, higher order of satisfaction, one that sensory pleasure alone was never going to provide.
The third is purpose based, the fulfilment of something larger: resolution, trust, coexistence itself. This is the widest and most durable of the three, and it tends to subsume the other two rather than compete with them. Someone genuinely living from a sense of larger purpose doesn't need to reject sensory pleasure or relational warmth. Both simply find their proper place underneath something bigger.
Most modern life is arranged almost entirely around the first category, chasing sensation, while treating the second and third as occasional bonuses rather than the deeper sources they actually are. The three aren't in competition, but they aren't equally durable either, and mistaking the shortest lasting one for the whole picture is a large part of why satisfaction so often runs out faster than expected.