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Do you know what you want? For Christmas, that is. I don’t. And it’s stressful. I feel as if I should. It seems wrong to look a gift horse in the mouth when people want to buy me stuff. And so I go on consumer websites to be reminded of what kind of stuff I might have wanted in the first place. At least there’s no shortage of ideas out there today, Black Friday - which is hailed as the official start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States - and which - in our on-line global village - you can’t now escape here either. You can fill your boots with cut-price goods today; the editor’s choice on one major retail website being remote-controlled helicopters, jewellery and top-of-the-range headphones. Do you know what you want? Because you might already have it. Two economists responsible for a study on happiness - which was reported yesterday - believe that our relentless cultural drive for ‘more’ can lead, ultimately, to less well-being. When we earn beyond an annual income of £22,000 - which we’ve just averaged here in the UK - they suggest that our aspirations rise acutely because we see more wealth and opportunity around us - which means we end up feeling increasingly dissatisfied with what we have already. And that’s something to beware, as the episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor warns. “No one longs for what he or she already has,” she writes, “and yet ... the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot where the treasure is,” she concludes, “is because we are standing on it.” It’s not necessarily wrong to want more. In a speech this week, Boris Johnson argued economically that “the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses ... is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.” Elsewhere, the Bible suggests that our desire for more can be channelled quite differently. “God has set eternity in the hearts of all people”, says Ecclesiastes, which helps to make sense to me of that nagging feeling that there must be more to life than this. But it’s a desire for something qualitatively more, isn’t it - time, space, soul, simplicity? - treasure which was ours to begin with, if we did but stop to realise it. And when we let go of trying to get more of what we don't really need, doesn’t it free us to make a difference with what we already have? By the way, the alternative to Black Friday is Buy Nothing Day, which is tomorrow in this country... and is one way, perhaps, of remembering what we might want more of, this Christmas, for a change.