I think you are very right. I also think I totally have no idea how to do it and it seems hard.
Everybody I know fights for things I already have.
Let me think it over and discuss it later. Or if you have some basic ideas, go on. Perhaps, meta-values. Is it possible to have goals if neither your happiness or not that of other people motivates you much, or are these necessary etc.
That's why retiring (or becoming a housewife) can be dangerous.
This feels weird, because it suggests people who still work are not in a high danger of it. I think it is not the case, only for special kinds of works but just doing office stuff to pay bills i.e. most people does not qualify in this. In other words, once a career reaches a point where diminishing marginal utilities become clear, the next improvement is hard and brings little change, and it becomes routine, I think it happens.
And yes, I see how it is a typical West Euro issue. The whole society is set up for floating in riskless, unchallenging dullness. People usually fix it with hobbies. The average Austrian is an alpine skier at heart and accountant work, not the other way around.
As many people have noted, Less Wrong currently isn't receiving as much content as we would like. One way to think about expanding the content is to think about which areas of study deserve more articles written on them.
For example, I expect that sociology has a lot to say about many of our cultural assumptions. It is quite possible that 95% of it is either obvious or junk, but almost all fields have that 5% within them that could be valuable. Another area of study that might be interesting to consider is anthropology. Again this is a field that allows us to step outside of our cultural assumptions.
I don't know anything about media studies, but I imagine that they have some worthwhile things to say about how we the information that we hear is distorted.
What other fields would you like to see some discussion of on Less Wrong?