Many philosophers, and many other kinds of thinkers, have grappled with this question, from the Epicureans through Heidegger, Sartre, and beyond. You could look at what they say, and/or at some accessible contemporary texts that draw on these ideas e.g. Havi Carel Illness: The Cry of the Flesh and Irvin Yalom Staring at the Sun. Some of us cope by thinking things through, others cope through not thinking about it at all.

If we base our view on a religion on how closely its views cohere with reality we shall have a tough time of it indeed. The point about religions is that they think they have a more acute view of reality than does the secular thinker. It does not seem to me that Islam is any worse, or better, than any other religion in the comparative stakes, although it gets a bad press in some cultures. I think you need to say why you think it is particuarly difficult to like, as compared with other religions, from an objective point of view. Islam has often seen itself as a religion in the middle, between the extreme asceticism of Christianity and the materialism of Judaism, and this is not an obviously ridiculous claim, even from a secular point of view.

You'd be begging the question against the nihilist, and presupposing or presuming too much, if you simply declared that there can be meaningfulness without God, but didn't argue for it. If you can find a way to argue for your view, then you haven't committed any of those sins. Of course, not everyone will find your argument (whatever it is) persuasive, but you'd be doing much more than begging the question, etc.

So--how can you argue for your view? You'll surely want to discuss the meaning of "meaningful." What does "the other side" think it means? Once you've figured that out, you may be able to make objections. For example, the idea behind the popular book "The Purpose Driven Life" is that having a built in purpose is the key to our lives being meaningful. That can be questioned through the artful use of examples. If the truth is that aliens are growing us as a food source (to be harvested when we hit a world population of 7 billion), would that give our lives meaning? (This is a question asked by Thomas Nagel in "The Absurd.")

Once you've questioned the theist's notion of meaningfulness, of course you have to come up with an alternative. Again, examples can be helpful. If you just boldly declared that life is meaningful if we devote ourselves to a "transcendent ethical cause" (one view out there), it would sound like you're "just assuming." But if you back up that view with detailed examples, the view starts to be convincing. It would be awfully counterintuitive to think that ethically committed people like Bill Gates and Paul Farmer can't be living meaningful lives if there is no god.

A good anthology on the meaning of life is Klemke and Cahn, The Meaning of Life. Both theistic and non-theistic views are represented. My book The Weight of Things argues that God and religion are not necessities, but the focus is on "the good life" more than on "the meaningful life." I recommend Julian Baggini's book What's It All About? too.

There is a discussion of this issue in rabbinic Judaism, whether it is better to have been born, suffer and then die, or to never have been born at all. The answer they come to is that the latter is preferable, but since we are alive, we might as well behave well. From a secular point of view the question as to whether one ought to stay alive if one's sufferings are immense is a very real one. I suppose comparing oneself with others is one way of putting one's experience in proportion and accepting that perhaps life is not as bad as it might otherwise seem.

There is an entertaining Monty Python sketch making fun of precisely what you are getting at, where different people talk about how tough their childhoods were, with the worst off trumping everyone else. The penultimate person talks about living in a box and the last man says with apparent envy "You had a box!" . But there is a serious point here, that we often feel miserable in situations which do not really call for that reaction, and we can appreciate this by considering people who really should be miserable if they are realistic. Someone said that having lots of money does not necessarily make you happy, it just means that you can be miserable in greater comfort, and there is something to be said for realizing that. So comparing ourselves with others is by no means vacuous.

Other historical figures who write on these themes are Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Mill. Many of these thinkers discussed together in intriguing ways private property rights and the value of work, and I think that Marx's arguments bear interesting relations to, for example, Locke's and Hegel's views on that. After Marx, Dewey and Arendt wrote on the large theme you name as do many contemporary philosophers working in the fields of political philosophy, feminist philosophy, business ethics, and environmental ethics -- probably any large-scale anthology of recent work in those fields will include some relevant material.

Marx's views aren't discussed as much these days as they were, say, in the late 1970s and 1980s when Gerry Cohen, John Roemer, Tom Bottomore, Alexander Callinicos, and others did much high-quality work in what was sometimes called "analytical Marxism." Those folks' critical work includes useful discussions of how Marx's ideas on work relate to work earlier in the history of philosophy. (I wish that Marx were discussed more now because, first, I think that his critiques of capitalism remain valuable in our century, and, second, I don't think that the sweeping objections that some have made Marx are correct, for example, the philosophical objection that Marx's discussion of ideological illusion means that he has no consistent standpoint to offer an ethical critique and the pundits' lame assertions that the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrate the irrelevance of Marx's ideas.)

The answer is NO.

Whatever incoherence there might be in wishing that *I* were just like David Beckham, this does not render it incoherent or irrational to desire or view as beneficial things which would, in effect, make one a different person.

Thus suppose that I wish that the person sitting in this chair one minute from now (and from then on) shall not be subject to any of the worries and temptations that distract me from what's important and that he shall otherwise be committed to the same ends as I am. Now would this person be me? That's an irrelevant question, because nothing about this topic was contained or implied in my wish. So my wish is perfectly coherent -- and also rational, I think, for my ends would be better promoted if my wish came true.

Now, of course, if your real end is that *you* should experience the positive reactions that many visit upon Beckham, then you better not wish for the person sitting in your chair a minute from now to be just like Beckham. For suppose you get what you wish for. Then whatever adulation would be bestowed upon that just-like-Beckham creature sitting in your chair would not be experienced by *you*, and so you sadly would not attain your real end.

Morale. A desire for a change that would make you a radically different person is incoherent only if (necessary condition) it also contains or implies the desire that this different person be you.

Even if this necessary condition is fulfilled, there may still be nothing incoherent about the desire -- for that different person may be you! Your wife's husband may be a different person a year from now not only by you being replaced by someone else, but also by your changing. For example, a year ago today, I resolved to lose my bad temper. More precisely, I desired that *I* would not get angry at people any more. I managed to live up to my resolution. So I've become a different person as far as my temper is concerned. But, on any non-eccentric account of personal identity, the person I am now is the person who made that resolution a year ago. I changed over the course of this past year -- I wasn't replaced by someone else. Since what actually happened is exactly what I desired, my desire wasn't incoherent. I desired that *I* should become a different (non-angry) person. I achieved what I desired, because the different (non-angry) person I've become is not so radically different as to be someone other than the person who made the resolution.

I hope so. And I think so. Especially if we understand philosophy in a general way to involve careful reflection on what we should be doing with our lives and how we should structure our relationships and societies, I think it can help us live better lives. While reflection isn't always good (e.g., in the middle of making a tennis shot or a guitar solo), surely it is often necessary in order to see how our ideas of what it means to lead a good life and create a good community are consistent with each other and with what other people in our community think. And when we see that they are inconsistent, we can consider how best to reconcile them to find what might be called reflective equilibrium. Another way of putting these points is to say that, whether we know it or not, we all have a philosophy (a set of ideas of which we are more or less aware) that guides our decision-making and personal interactions. It seems that trying to figure out what our philosophy is will make it more likely that we will live better lives at least in the sense of living lives that better reflect our own philosophy. (Of course, some people are very aware of their philosophy but have very bad ideas about how to live, so self-reflection alone is not sufficient for leading a good life.)

OK, but maybe you are asking whether philosophy, as it is practiced by professional philosophers, can help us live better lives (I'm not sure why you put 'better' in quotation marks--perhaps because you worry that better and worse are subjective, in which case, I hope philosophy can make us lead (for real!) better lives in part by helping us see that some lives really are better than others--e.g., Elie Wiesel has really led a better life than Bernie Madoff). The answer to this question is harder, but I still hope and think that the answer is 'yes.' I hope that professional philosophers can help students do the sort of reflection suggested above and do it better than they might have otherwise. I hope we can help scientists think more clearly about some of the problems they consider (e.g., in my own case, the issue of free will and responsible agency). And I hope we can help politicians, lawyers, doctors, secret agents, etc.--the people who most directly influence the way we structure our societal relations--think more clearly about the reasons they are doing what they are doing. By helping systematize our thinking about certain subjects--e.g., what a theory is, what a political philosophy is, what counts as knowledge--I think we can, at a large scale, better achieve what I suggested above we need to do at the individual level: reflect on what we should be doing with our lives and how we should structure our social relationships in order to make them internally consistent and maximally effective.

To answer your second question first, you are correct that what is natural is not always good (though of course we need to know what we mean by "natural" and "good"). For instance, if we mean by "natural" what humans have strong desires to do, presumably in part because of our evolutionary history, then it will be natural for humans to eat pretty much as much sugar and salt and fat as we can (in the environments in which we evolved, sugar, salt, and fat, all of which are crucial for survival, were scarce enough that there would be little selection pressure to limit consumption of them). But if by "good" we mean what will keep us healthy and alive, then in our current environment, our natural desires to eat so much sugar, salt, and fat are not good. What is natural is not good.

Similar arguments might be given for a variety of desires or behaviors, which humans plausibly have developed in part because of our (natural) selective history, and which we would not call good: promiscuity, racism, sexism, greed, aggression (especially between males and between "tribes), hierarchical social systems, etc. Of course, our selective history also likely endowed us with desires to be faithful to the parent of our children, to be generous (at least to some conspecifics, especially family), to control aggression, to limit inequities, etc.

The upshot is that we have lots of competing "natural" desires and traits, and our cultures and upbringing shape them in various ways, so getting us to desire and do what is good might require shaping what is natural in certain ways.

Now, why do so many equate 'natural' with 'good'? Good question. Perhaps some do it because, as I just pointed out, our good desires and traits are also part of our nature (everything about us is part of our nature!), so a lot of what is natural is good. A related reason is that people may have reason to think that what is unnatural is not good, if what is unnatural involves corruption of what is naturally good in us or the world.

Finally, some may make this move for religious reasons. God made nature. God is good. So, what is natural is good. (And what is unnatural must be bad because it is "against God".)

I don't take any of these reasons to be any good. (In philosophy, these sorts of questions sometimes gets discussed in terms of Hume's "is-ought gap" or the "naturalistic fallacy.")

You are right and they are wrong. It is not.

On the other hand, we are part of the natural world so it is no bad thing for us to acknowledge this.

An excellent question, it is important to reflect upon the things we invest our lives into. I think there are three very different concerns you might have about investing life into these activities:

1: Perhaps, these activities aren't happiness at all, but merely distract you from genuine happiness.

2: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good to a degree, but distract you from more important things that are more central to happiness.

3: Perhaps, these activities are genuinely good because you find them pleasurable (or fulfill your desires). And pleasure (or fulfilled desire) is the only thing that is genuinely good, but these ways of pursuing pleasure are only effective short-term and are likely to undercut your total amount of long-term pleasure.

Since you ask whether there is any value in these things at all, you seem to be more concerned about the first potential problem. However, the good news for you is that Plato's view is a minority view (even among philosophers) since it presupposes that something like virtue or wisdom is the ONLY genuinely good thing in life. He thought that other things were so irrelevant to 'true' happiness that 'no one could harm the good man' even if they unjustly executed the good man.

However, problems two and three are also very real potential problems. For problem two, assume that there are a variety of things that are genuinely good and contribute to happiness... things like physical pleasure, experiencing beauty, authentic relationships, knowledge, virtue, fulfilling desires, spiritual experience, etc. (feel free to modify the list by adding or subtracting things that appeal to you). Well, in this case there is a risk that you might lead an unbalanced life and miss out on important things because you are overly preoccupied with one or two things on the list. So, to take an extreme example suppose you play video games and do drugs so much that you never experience genuine undrugged authentic friendship, you might miss out on something truly great in life.

Finally, suppose something like pleasure is the only genuinely good thing in life that constitutes happiness. Well, the things that you are involved in certainly bring you pleasure. Yet they still might distract you from something even more pleasurable like authentic friendship or certain types of knowledge. Also, suppose that drugs are damaging to your health or psyche in some way that makes it difficult for you to maximize your pleasure long term. In either of these cases, you need to consider whether you are undermining your long term happiness.

That being said, I think that things like video games and creating and listening to music are certainly enjoyable to those who prefer them. For these activities, it is simply a question of balancing them with other pursuits. I'd be more concerned about the long-term effects of drugs (though I admit I'm not an expert on their effects). It does seem to me that addictions of all sorts are significant threats to long-term happiness on all accounts of happiness.