This article remind me of this quote in Conan the Barbarian:

    Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
    Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
    Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
    Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.
    Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

What makes life worth living is not to have won in the past and you can now be satisfied with your situation but to win right now and to be making progress right now. You call it the Boogeyman, I call it the essence of what it is to be alive.

Religions (I happen to be a Christian) have answers to this. For most of them, physical or economic progress is not the answer, at least not the main answer.

That said, all but the most religious people have a mix in their head (and I include myself in this) between what their religion says and what the culture around them says; and that mix usually destroys, in whole or in part, whatever sense of peace or fulfillment the religion could supply.

The hedonist will complain that, the hedonic treadmill means humans can't get any happier by having more.

I would flip it around: the hedonic treadmill means people get to experience the same amount of happiness regardless of their lot in life. Is that not a good thing?

To quote from A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.

"You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do. "