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Eh, I do. I do actually enjoy doing what I do, most of the time. Do you claim that if your proposed solution were implemented, people would be any happier with their lives and daily routines than they are now?
I'm not somebody who believes in linear progress - and, as a corollary to that, I don't believe in linear regress...at least in terms of the relative "goodness" or "badness" of the world. I don't think that the average person today is any happier than the average person before plumbing, or penicillin, or all the rest of modern medicine, sanitation and the other social services enhanced by scientific progress. Nor do I think that they were any happier than us. There never were any "good ol' days" -- at least in terms of individual contentment. "The human condition" is always in the singular for a reason. It stays the same.
So, if we aren't getting any happier, what the hell have we accomplished as a species?
If you value intellectual growth (which, given your disdainful treatment of education, you don't seem to), then we can definitively say that the general corpus of knowledge increases as mankind experiences and discovers new things over the passage of time.
In recent years, capitalism facilitated that (in part). Did it have to be capitalism? Of course not. Any system that could concentrate resources in order to conduct the kind of inquiry and scholarship necessary for the expansion of knowledge would have accomplished it just as well (let's all give a nod to the Sputnik). Try building a space shuttle in an egalitarian hunter-gatherer society. Or a submarine. Or a pacemaker. Or, for that matter, an online discussion board.
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