Your enjoyment is a machine responding to neural stimuli that evolved to follow gradients in order to propagate genes. This enjoyment is infinitesimal no matter how much you generate in your short lifespan. None of it will be enjoyed when you perish. Even more damning: the pleasure you had ten minutes ago cannot be enjoyed now. Sex, fine meals, belongings from years ago can't bring you anything. It's just ephemeral chemical flux. Saturating those pathways is malinvestment into entropy.

Thought and actions have much more meaning to time than our tiny, worthless genes. Or the neurotransmitters dancing in our brains. Or the decaying weights that hold thoughts just briefly. Brains carry a simulation of the world for a short time. They cannot be shared or replicated or extended. Their pleasure has no value to anyone but yourself, and like the hedonic treadmill on which they run, it doesn't provide enduring value. Just an endless appetite that calls to be satiated. Thoughts and actions, however, pay civilizational dividends. They endure beyond our short lives and carry our world's evolution into the vast future.

We're all already practically dead. It won't be long. The years tick by in the blink of an eye. Everyone you know is growing old. You can make your finite choices and optimize for a few good trips, and a sports car if you want, but that's all meaningless. When you get Alzheimer's you won't remember. When you get cancer, it'll bring you little comfort. And when you die, it'll all be annihilated.

Accolades and remembrance and legacy don't matter either. Just your actions and how they shape the future live on.

That isn't to say you should live an entirely ascetic lifestyle devoid of pleasure and friends and family. We need some comfort to maintain our happiness and sanity. But to make it life's sole purpose seems like the greatest waste in the majestic algorithm of the cosmos. We're each the universe alive for the blink of an eye, and to only pleasure and tickle ourselves is such a shallow thing to spend such an invaluable thing on.

I know lots of folks that live for the next vacation or the next big purchase, and they're spending their careers writing plumbing or glue, or shuffling paper. That's something I can't wrap my head around. It's not cope. It's recognition of our place in time.

I agree with most of what you said, but to be frank: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j95kNwZw8YY

Depending on your perspective, life can be amazing and full of wonders, or it could be drudgery where the only thing which makes you happy is a moment of respite. Someone could easily strawman your argument by saying that everything you do is worthless because we're infinitesimal beings on a tiny rock orbiting a star in a corner of the universe. The Sun is going to explode eventually, humans might destroy the planet no matter what you do, or an asteroid might take us all out like the dinosaurs, rendering your life of actions and purposeful existence useless in the end.

All of this is to say, do what makes you happy and dont worry about others so much.

Well okay. But what if you're impoverished and must work every day simply to make enough food to survive the winter. That's as much a life "for pleasure". It's not sportscars and caviar, but it's the same drive to acquire, accumulate, thrive, gain wealth (survival). These people are also working for the good of the civilization. How do you know that the big spender dedicating their time to redistributing wealth they generate isn't contributing anything? Surely civilization does not live on ideas alone. We can't all be depressed pontificators, and i for one believe there's nothing wrong with not wanting to live the ideas you're stating here. Sure, there are hard truths, but there's also ways to state them with beauty and not brutalism and disdain.