cumberlandblues, I can relate with wanting to feel happiness, chemical or not--but I have found happiness in my chosen career path, and one of my largest motivators to get sober is my desire to excel in my field. A field wherein some can comfortably, as you say, work for 30 years making money for someone else (though if you are going to do that, why not pick a job you don't hate?), but one can also venture into business and actually risk your own money and reap significant rewards.
I don't know what your personality and preferences are like, but I'm sure that if I explored your psyche for a couple of hours, we'd be bound to find at least a short list of activities you can find happiness in doing, fields which you find interesting, and even business models to aim for that enable you to profit in accordance to your work, rather than just make some guy rich. All it takes is a little creativity to reformulate it into a job you can sustain yourself with, but we all enjoy something, don't you think?
On another note, I suspect you are using the notions of 'pleasure' and 'happiness' with an interchangeability they do no in fact possess. What chemicals induce in your brain is pleasure. It mimics what happens in your brain when you orgasm, meditate profoundly, eat chocolate, (all activities whose main or desired consequence is achieving this state of neurochemistry), or sometimes, when random crap happens in life, except that this random crap is extremely positive in the terms of your worldview. What I mean is that events, which have causes and consequences entirely unrelated to your neurochemical state, such as receiving your university diploma, caused by sustained effort and a desire to enter a professional field, with quality-of-life increase as consequence--the realization of a long-term goal or long-time dream (such as children) and the related empowering of belief in personal aptitude and capacity to achieve, the reaffirmation that life "pays out", that is called happiness. Moments of happiness, of different magnitude and intensity, also generate that neurochemical state we call pleasure. But pleasure is merely the "taste" of happiness. The life-reaffirming moment of happiness is the "substance", and without it, one can not speak of happiness. This is why addicts need re-dosing, but the happiness a child produces will cheer you up in your darkest hours until the day you die.
The neurochemical pathways we abuse as addicts have natural purposes--the pleasure pathways, via happiness, are perhaps meant for us to associate the perceived improvement of our lives with sheer pleasure, so that we tolerate spending months and years and sweat and tears into improving our lives. What we do as addicts is cheat the system--bypass spending time or effort, bypass improving or even properly sustaining your own life sometimes, and getting the reward for free (or for a few bucks from a connect). We want to be happy, but all we can buy is pleasure. After a while, you are jaded to pleasure, and when you run out, you have nothing to be happy about. Maybe you never did--maybe you haven't in a really long time. Drugs make us not need to seek happiness in order to feel its reward, which is why so many addicts enter a stasis wherein their life evolves reactively and out of necessity, rarely advancing due to the consequences of their addiction and a lack of motivation (easier to get high).
Long story short, my point is that achievements, education, a career and the like will not necessarily make YOU happy--it has to be a PERCEIVED improvement of your life for the trick to work. So set yourself up with goals that you actually wish you could do, and start busting your ass.