If you want the wrong things, for the wrong reasons, to the wrong degree, etc, then duh, of course you'll be unhappy. We are the heirs of thousands of years of thought on the subject and yet we walk around oblivious to millennia of wisdom. WE know better, of course, because we came later.

An obnoxious dogma of liberalism (as in Lockean philosophy, not as in liberal institutions -- a VERY important distinction as the latter does not require the former) seems to be that any desire is an axiomatically and unquestionable good always, with no reference to human nature and what human nature tells us is good. (I won't name the recent manifestations of the late stage liberal freak show.) Human nature is what allows us to determine whether a desire is disordered or not such a pica, pedophilia, or zoophilia, though as the full consequences of liberalism manifest, I would not be surprised if these will eventually be "discredited" as bigoted, narrow-minded, and hateful cultural and social constructions. Ideology, as always, is impervious and blind to reason, so I will no doubt be downvoted given how deeply the poison of Lockean thought has penetrated into our culture. When hedonism has possessed a man, there is not even the slightest willingness to consider the truth, and if he were to witness it, he would likely fail to recognize it because of how blinded he's become by the mindless pursuit of pleasure.

If you want to learn something about happiness, we have to look to insights of the classical tradition and not the lunacy that seized the world not 20 minutes ago. Pieper, for example, has written an excellent book on the four cardinal virtues. He's very lucid and speaks directly to the understanding. That's just the beginning.