I wanna make a longer version of this post later but…
Those sentiments about how ~happiness is in the small things uwu~ is really disheartening. Because while those things do exist, there’s also quite a bit of misery in the small things: getting stuck in traffic on your way to work, mosquito bites, the common cold, interpersonal drama, etc. And on top of that there are a shit ton of ways for humans to be absolutely, unimaginably miserable which have no equivalent in the realm of happiness. There’s no opposite to the holocaust, or to sexual assault, or to being kept in Guantanamo Bay for decades. I don’t get how people can honestly think that existence is net positive.
So, uh, this is tangent to the things with which I’m obsessed. And I’m inclined to agree with you as regards the “happiness is in the small things” philosophy.
(It’s worth noting that there are people whose hedonic experience is set very differently, for whom “happiness is in the small things” seems intuitive and obvious and much more salient than “misery is in the small things,” and I’m not inclined to assume that they’re lying when they report their experience. Humans are different, man. Where do things fall, on average, on the spectrum? I’ve got no clue. It has not escaped my notice that My Cultural Cluster, both online and in meatspace, is gobsmackingly more depression-prone than is typical; thus I expect that all my intuitions are somewhat warped.)
But the real answer, I’m pretty sure, is that most people get through existence by doing something other than happiness-chasing, and that they have most of their investment in goals that don’t directly devolve to “be happy.”
(This is a place where I think the reductionism of common rationalist utilitarian thinking fails in practical terms. You can act like everyone’s goal is really just “maximize personal utility,” and that it’s simply a matter of people getting different amounts of utility from different things – you can even define your terms so that this is true tautologically – but for most concrete purposes “utility” and “happiness” etc. map onto mental states, and you immediately bump into the fact that many people care about external outcomes and are unwilling to trade those outcomes for any quality of mental state.)
It is often claimed that embracing this, and giving up on happiness as a terminal goal, is useful or even necessary for achieving happiness. Cf. Haita the Shepherd.
But tricking yourself into happiness-through-no-mind seems like a difficult and failure-prone plan. The more common route by far is just to…care more about something else. Saving the world. The quality of your art. The number of paperclips in existence. Whatever.
…if your hedonic setpoint is set low enough, this may be difficult or impossible, I suppose, in the same way that it’s difficult or impossible to ignore chronic pain. But I suspect that most humans, even if they’re not really happy happy, are happy enough that it ceases to be an overriding concern.