So, what got me out of feeling as if the world was crushing in around me and all that shit was sitting back to think about what I actually wanted. It was very easy for me to see what was wrong with the world when I had no idea what right was.
For me, it turned out to be beauty. Looking around the world and seeing all these things, from gemstones to paintings to flowers to the bark of a tree to patterns in the mud to the growth of crystals in bone. Even death has beauty in the challenges it forces us to endure and overcome, and the new life that springs from the corpse of the old; and that's to say nothing of what came with the life before. More than that, there's beauty in feeling, from the race of my heart around an attractive person to the chill of rain on my skin, and in thinking about everything from arithmetic to "What are thoughts, even?" And don't get me started on all these incredibly gorgeous, unpredictable minds I'm surrounded by on a daily basis. Seriously, you people (and I mean people in general, not just Bay12, although there are some choice minds around these parts) are the hottest things since Sol.
This enormous, complicated, inexplicable world is all the more beautiful because it's all those things, at least to me. My standards of beauty are far from universal. And they shouldn't be universal! That would be to diminish the whole, I think.
So, that's what I figured I really wanted. To experience as much beauty as I could before something offs me, or I get too tired to keep going. Not to understand all of it, though; I'd never fit it all in my head, lowly human as I am, and the trying would just force too many people and things into too few boxes, and again diminish the beauty of it all. Understanding is great, in that it unlocks the way to see new kinds of beauty and appreciate old ones in new ways, it's just not the end-all goal.
And from that perspective, from the idea of what I want to do instead of what I don't, I can't say I have any complaints. At least, none that have to do with my general outlook on life. I've still got tons of problems, of course, and they need dealing with, but I can't say I'm miserable. There's always something new I can experience, however small it might seem.
Mind you, in college I was pretty much set on getting rich off skills I didn't possess and lusting after women who weren't interested in me, and I was miserable as fuck then. So take that for what you will.