Everybody happy?

I did not sleep well last night--the cat had sudden onset idiopathic paranoid schizophrenic howling fits and woke me up repeatedly until all my poor mind could do was to adopt an (also idiopathic) metaphysical bent which left me wondering about the Reason We Are Here. No big religio/spiritual discussion intended--it just occurred to me that the human population is pretty evenly split between those who say our purpose on Earth is nothing more than to maximize happiness and those who take the gloomier view that such behavior leads to perdition. The party of the first part would ideally go about their lives acquiring things, experiencing things: fine wine, good sex, second homes in Vail (sorry, that's about all the Good Life I can imagine this morning), while the party of the second part will typically be found repenting in the church of their choice or in the case of radical left non-believers, telling us why our present behavior will sooner rather than later lead us directly to destruction and extinction. I do have a taste for good wine and have no particular quarrel with good sex, but other than that have never been able to happily sign on to the live-it-up, there's-no-tomorrow, fungal colony-like philosophy. Lemmings are probably as happy as (clams? lemmings?) eating nice Arctic greenery to their little hearts' content until it all goes bad and they stampede into the sea. And those fungal colonies just never do know what is going on when they run out of resources and die off suddenly. I may be speaking from my early brainwashing in the Episcopal Church, but it has always seemed to me that there should be a higher purpose to us (and maybe to fungi as well). And I confess right now I have now idea what "higher" means--I guess it can mean millions of different things to millions of different people. I personally mean something a lot more complicated than Mr. God sitting up there in a big gold chair. However, I do congenitally fall into the scolding camp, being ever ready to speak ill of my fellow humans when I see them doing asinine things like building more coal-fired power plants, but there is part of me that feels a little guilty doing that since I am part of the self-destructive colony too and am going just as rapidly as everyone else to perdition. So why shouldn't I just relax and enjoy it? Still no answer on this one, as usual I have one leg on either side of the fence, which luckily for me is not barb wire. Maybe I will just live it up today as my mind is so exhausted from doing the taxes, editing a legal brief, worrying about whether my daughter will get home safe, and that damn cat's howling all night that what else can a sane person do? (Sane?)