>>302765Chasing happiness matters because it affirms the self. If you are sad and someone tells you to cheer up and smile, it's not because they're a hedonistic hylic attempting to trap you in this realm. It's because they want you to actualize even the slightest amount of external energy such that it may affect your mood and ideally make someone else happy as well. If others around smile in turn when they see you, this creates electricity between humans. We are just nodes in a grid looking for signals which can be processed and received, we are literally no different from insects except for the fact that we can somewhat act independent of our base wants and needs. Pursuing happiness means you gain better control of your emotions, and it shifts that "baseline" you mention up in the same way that a routine lifter will, over time, expend less effort moving the same amount of weight. There was a series of videos done by some old lady on youtube a while back as therapy, and all she did was laugh in them for several minutes. To you or I it seems weird but it's probably one of the most self-affirming actions you could take, to broadcast happiness to the world and allow anyone to view you in a state of pure, unadulterated joy. Someone could be depressed, they could never make anyone happy besides themselves, but neither of these things would lead to a zero sum outcome. You can be sad inside and make things improve overall by forcing a happy state. You can feel contentment in the face of cruel, unjust world and block out any negative reinforcement. That's how powerful people actually are when they stop thinking in loaded terminology and acknowledge free will as it pertains to who we are and how we choose to function.