The pursuit of happiness

The day before 'Action for Happiness' launched this week, I happened to be thinking a lot about happiness. I haven't studied what Action for Happiness are saying in detail yet, but the Big Idea that occurred to me seems a bit different, and more fundamental, than what they're talking about.

My Big Idea about happiness is this: It is non-obvious that the pursuit of happiness is difficult. And this matters A Lot.

The reason why Action for Happiness will fail is that everyone has in fact spent their entire lives trying to maximise their happiness. What is the point, people will think, in a campaign to persuade me to do something I've been doing continually from the moment I first cried as a baby. The point should be that, despite the fact that we have been doing this our entire lives, we've been doing it in an instinctive and blundering way and we still aren't any good at it. And as with brain surgery and anything else that we aren't any good at, skills can be learnt.

Take materialism. Action for happiness seem to criticise materialism a bit. I'm not sure they should, as people will assume that they're trying to take away all their nice material possessions. The problem is that we're bad at working out which material possessions will actually make us happier. If we were better at doing that, we could either buy more of the ones that do make us happier, or save the money (and time taken to earn it) we currently waste on ones we don't 'need'. This will probably reduce materialism, but materialism is only the symptom.