Currently my thought processes go something more like: "When I think about the things that make me happy, I come up with a list like meritocracy and unity and productivity and strong central authority. I don't come up with things like freedom. Taking those things to their logical conclusion, I should propose a society designed like so... wait... Oh my god that's terrifying, I've just come up with a society that the mere description of causes other people to want to run screaming, this is bad, RED ALERT, SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH MY BRAIN. I should distrust my moral intuitions. I should place increased trust in ideas like doing science to see what makes people happiest and then doing that, because clearly just listening to my moral intuitions is a terrible way to figure out what will make other people happy. In fact, before I do anything likely to significantly change anyone else's life, I should do some research or test it on a small scale in order to check whether or not it will make them happy, because clearly just listening to what I want/like is a terrible idea."

I'm not so sure you should distrust your intuitions here. I mean, let's be frank, the same people who will rave about how every left-wing idea from liberal feminism to state socialism is absolutely terrible, evil, and tyrannical will, themselves, manage to reconstruct most of the same moral intuitions if left alone on their own blogs. I mean, sure, they'll call it "neoreaction", but it's not actually that fundamentally different from Stalinism. On the more moderate end of the scale, you should take account of the fact that anti-state right-wing ideologies in Anglo countries right now are unusually opposed to state and hierarchy across the space of all human societies ever, including present-day ones.

POINT BEING, sometimes you should distrust your distrust of certain intuitions, and ask simply, "How far is this intuition from the mean human across history?" If it's close, actually, then you shouldn't treat it as, "Something [UNUSUAL] is wrong with my brain." The intuition is often still wrong, but it's wrong in the way most human intuitions are wrong rather than because you have some particular moral defect.

So if the "motivate yourself by thinking about a great world and working towards it" is a terrible option for me because my brain's imagine-great-worlds function is messed up, then clearly I need to look for an alternative motivation. And "motivate yourself by thinking about clearly evil things like death and disease and suffering and then trying to eliminate them" is a good alternative.

See, the funny thing is, I can understand this sentiment, because my imagine-great-worlds function is messed-up in exactly the opposite way. When I try to imagine great worlds, I don't imagine worlds full of disciplined workers marching boldly forth under the command of strong, wise, meritorious leadership for the Greater Good -- that's my "boring parts of Shinji and Warhammer 40k" memories.

Instead, my "sample great worlds" function outputs largely equal societies in which people relate to each-other as friends and comrades, the need to march boldly forth for anything when you don't really want to has been long-since abolished, and people spend their time coming up with new and original ways to have fun in the happy sunlight, while also re-terraforming the Earth, colonizing the rest of the Solar System, and figuring out ways to build interstellar travel (even for digitized uploads) that can genuinely survive the interstellar void to establish colonies further-out.

I consider this deeply messed-up because everyone always tells me that their lives would be meaningless if not for the drudgery (which is actually what the linked post is trying to refute).

I am deeply disturbed to find that a great portion of "the masses" or "the real people, outside the internet" seem to, on some level, actually feel that being oppressed and exploited makes their lives meaningful, and that freedom and happiness is value-destroying, and that this is what's at the root of all that reactionary rhetoric about "our values" and "our traditions"... but I can't actually bring myself to say that they ought to be destroyed for being wired that way.

I just kinda want some corner of the world to have your and my kinds of wiring, where Progress is supposed to achieve greater freedom, happiness, and entanglement over time, and we can come up with our own damn fates rather than getting terminally depressed because nobody forced one on us.

Likewise, I can imagine that a lot of these goddamn Americans are wired in such a way that "being made to do anything by anyone else, ever" seems terminally evil to them. Meh, give them a planetoid.