A lot of people equate the two. Pleasure is short-lived, happiness is long-lived.
Pleasure is visceral, happiness is ethereal. Pleasure is taking, happiness is giving.
Pleasure can be achieved with sustances, happiness cannot be achieved with substances.
Pleasure is experienced alone, happiness is experienced in social groups.
The extremes of pleasure all lead to addiction, yet there’s no such thing as being addicted to too much happiness.
Pleasure is dopamine, and happiness is serotonin. There’s one thing that down regulates, serotonin, dopamine. So the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get. Las vegas, madison Avenue, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C., have very specifically and in a coordinated fashion confused and conflated happiness with the term pleasure, so that you can buy happiness.
And in the process, we have become most decidedly unhappy.