I've taken a much more pragmatic approach to this conundrum since roughly a year, and I shall improvise now an acronym for it: TPITP. The Proof Is In The Pudding. Instead of trying to proclaim truth from faulty subjectivity, regardless of our resolute mortalism or our coveting of health and wealth, we ascend and take notes from the COLLECTIVE, from the masses, those dynamic microbes swirling in the chessboard of late-stage-capitalism, enamoured with life.
On one hand, we can see that life is: hunger, lust, thirst, envy, a contest for resources and attention, a pitiless stream of needs that in most cases are satiated only in part, and that when satiated fully give way to boredom, and when not satiated enough cause massive suffering. This is what Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, and is also true.
On the other, if we apply a closer look to the individuals, we find them largely engrossed with and protective of this state? Why is this? How can they love their misery? But oh, can't we see? These people are not just miserable. They're joyful. They're excited. They're comfortable. They're hopeful. They're deluded. They're physically healthy and just take the basic pleasures that life offers, which are enormous. They're many things, including miserable, including trapped.
So what is life? A mistake? A prison? Something decidedly delightful that is otherwise fragile and sometimes is snatched from our hands by an enemical breeze? It is all of those things. Life is Love, or Eros. It is not 'falling in love' for nothing. Eros is the creative principle, the Life Drive of Freud, the Will to Exist of Schopenhauer. Romance, Eros, is a delighful folly, a pleasurable wound. We exist in that folly/not folly, those that choose to exist, we exist in the ongoing dramatic saga of WANTING, of propelling forward, of marching towards our goals.
The Death Drive, that Will to Dissolve is as respectable and real as Eros. It is that need for rest that overcomes us at night, or after a long shift at work, or after a strenous relationship with someone, and certainly when nothing in our life is giving us pleasure, hope or comfort.
So going back to a pragmatic way of solving the riddle, let's apply TPITP. Do most people want to die? No, they want the opposite. Can you argue then that for everyone, in all cases, death is preferable? No, this is lunacy. We have seen how the collective is formed by people that enjoy and covet existence, are we going to call their happiness delusion, an act? I prefer to be objective here and call it a bittersweet addiction, a fever dream, that by popular vote seems to be better than nothing.