But I digress. I know little of your personal worldview beyond your frustrations. What do you really love (and not just euro-techno-disco fat beats)? What do you value? What does happiness look like to you? What would your world look like to be defined as "happy"? You can answer any combination of those questions or none at all. They came out a bit stream of consciousness.
I have a naturalistic worldview. It's tempting to devolve that to "seek as much pleasure and avoid as much pain as you can," yes. But pleasure should be sought without restricting the ability of others to find it as well, and pleasures can range from the base physical to the refined intellectual, like the pleasures of stimulating conversation. Intelligence should be a keystone in a pleasurable world. Epicurus is definitely one to check out.
I don't believe in souls, and so I don't believe that a person can change their mind absolutely 100%, or absolutely 100% transcend pain or suffering, or the common human condition—at least without damaging their psyche. I think that Buddhist monks capable of immolation without showing pain fall into the latter category; they've achieved that by having very restricted, mind-warping lives. But I think life should be more oriented towards just enjoyment. The Western ideal of "happiness" is something that one works to earn, and once one has it, one feels good all the time! Because one is "happy" when you get happiness, and until you have it, you aren't happy. That's completely fucked up, of course. Happiness is being content and enjoying life. It is not a constant endorphin rush, something that's biologically impossible anyway, since our mind is designed to get used to always regress to a baseline of neutrality. Old pains diminish in time, and extreme pleasures and joys fade with time as well.
So life is a challenge of two balances—balancing physical and intellectual pleasure (either in the extreme causes unrest or diminishing returns with time), and balancing instantaneous pleasure with delaying pleasure in expectation of greater reward. Epicurus cautioned against working your guts out for years in expectation of some better pleasure; he said be realistic, and reminded that life is here to be lived right now—don't trade your entire youth for some future dream, since it may not be as rewarding as you expect, or you may have regrets, or god forbid, you may die before you get the future dream, and you'll have spent the last time of your life working your guts out. It's a very tough balance to find, especially since humans are imperfect. We can't know the future, and we are living in a world in which unimaginably complex systems (like the global economy) which we can't hope to completely keep up with are determining our fate by the second. It gets even harder when basic pleasures like food have to be metered for some people, or aren't available to enjoy. Life's harder in a society in which food is of lower quality and makes you fatter faster; you can't enjoy the pleasure of food as much. And it's harder in a sex-negative society as well. Then there are extremes of pleasure or addiction, like being addicted to a MMORPG. Epicurus warned against satiating pleasures to their maximum extent, since too much of a good thing will tire it out and make it not fun anymore over time.
So I guess it's a rather classical approach. I blend it with Stoicism to handle the bad parts. Life throws you a curveball? Well, as Epictetus said, "be cautious in what you can control; be courageous in what you cannot." Try to steer things so things don't turn to shit. But if they do, be courageous, since it's not like you have a choice about it anyway. And above all else, as long as we're human, we can't "break" out of the human condition. We'll never be completely satisfied with life or anything. And that's part of living! That's what we are. We'll wake up everyday and have some new desire or something to do. It's the name of the game. To seek anything else is to warp oneself. Enjoy the ride and do something meaningful in a meaningless world.
I would nonetheless try to make everyone have the highest possible ethical awareness. I'm always trying to be more ethical myself. Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis is my favorite human. There is stuff we're doing, like the environment or overpopulation, that will seriously fuck up the ability of future generations to enjoy themselves. But it's a long, hard road to reach the level of ethical maturity necessary to recognize things like that. Instead, you could be selfish and no one would care. A lot of people would probably accept you even more. There's a lot of hate for activists, environmentalists, feminists, and everything else. In the same token, in my world, I would remind of a need for humanity to keep progressing and learning, and learning. To pierce the mysteries of the universe...that's a pleasurable pursuit in itself.
It'd make me happy to write and be a feminist activist as a career. That pretty much limits me to being a professor, of if I'm lucky, someone who landed a job in a non-profit. No other movements inspire such zeal within me as ending the patriarchy. But overall, in a perfect world, I'd just like to enjoy myself. Go places, make friends, enjoy life...a Tom Petty, Jeffrey Lebowski lifestyle. I'd still be a productive son of a bitch, but it'd all be pleasurable intellectual pursuits. Even feminism is tinged with sadness, because being passionate about it is being reminded constantly that the world sucks. Anyway, to live in that kind of lifestyle right now, one needs to either have passive income (which is unethical to me), or just be poor. Not for me. I'm glad there's at least something I enjoy that can pay, although I'm not currently doing it right now.
Sometimes I really wish I were a Captain Ahab, though. Life would be so much easier if I had some obsessive productive desire to the point of monomania. Decisions become really easy then.
