I struggled a lot with purpose until my first son was born. Then life suddenly snapped into perfect clarity. I also had this instant revelation about what "faith" really means to the religious. It was a beautiful feeling to know, without any doubt or waivering confidence what your purpose is. It makes every decision I ever have to make really simple, because it always boils down to what is best for my kids.

Am I "happy"? I dunno. My 10 month old woke me up 5 times last night and as a result today was a stunningly miserable slog. But I have meaning, and that gives me direction and tremendous joy.

Your argument perfectly applies to 'meaning' as well, as companies increasingly market their products as life styles, communities, families etc. Someone can focus on meaning and still fall into that exact same trap, which I don't think is helpful either.

I think the problem lies with work. Increasingly, people have to work more for less in order to survive. They have to squeeze more out of meager savings, worry about their health and often have little to no time to actually explore their lives or their communities. Suburbanization has made this aspect worse by making it harder to leave the suburbs and placing people into small bubbles of slowly fermenting restlessness.

Unless meaning makes me happy, I don't see the reason to focus on it.

This discussion is rather circular, to be honest. Happiness, by my definition, is a state of having achieved a goal or goals. (I wrote this lengthy thing over ten years ago trying to put hard definitions on words like happiness/satisfaction/pleasure etc: http://www.karmatics.com/docs/dictionary.html )

Maybe you define happiness differently than me, but I have a hard time understanding how it can be considered "not worth chasing" by any definition that makes sense to me.

Because some things get further away when you chase them