It’s telling too that the only serious discussion about whether the hedonic quality of life is negative or positive seems to come from depressed people. Happy people talk down to you about how the question isn’t worth discussing.
It’s telling, indeed, but…mostly not in the way that you seem to mean.
If your value metric consists solely of gauging hedonic experience, then – yes, in many cases it’s going to end up in the red. (And whether or not that’s the case probably has more to do with inborn brain chemistry shit than anything else.)
So why don’t we have a suicide rate closer to 50%? OK, let’s be honest, it’s partly because of cowardice / survival instincts that cause people to cling to life even when they’re miserable. And it’s partly because people are bad prognosticators who often err towards optimism.
But it’s mostly because there aren’t actually that many humans who measure value solely by gauging hedonic experience. Like, it’s not an accident or a mistake that “fill the world with wireheaded bliss junkies” is not a popular policy goal.
At some hedonic set-point, the course of wisdom becomes “stop paying so much attention to your emotional state and focus on attaining whatever things you want.” This does away with the problem nicely on an abstract level, thus producing outside-view satisfaction, and has the delightful side-effect of usually generating additional hedons in the bargain. Cf. “Haita the Shepherd” on the psychological futility of chasing after joy, and the comparative viability of just letting it show up sometimes.
If your baseline emotional state is sufficiently shitty, this becomes extremely difficult, in approximately the same way that it’s difficult for a starving man to act on advice like “wise and happy people don’t obsess over food all the time.” I, uh, I know this one very well.
Even so.