Permaculture as a philosophical problem

Permaculture has a philosophical problem. If a permanent, easy lifestyle could be attained, would it be a happy one? Do we need the rat race to be happy? Has competition been bred into us?
Evolutionary psychology may have something to do with it. Why be happy with what you have? Isn't the notion that you're content an indicator that you could have more?
Think of Amish and Mennonite people. They live with less, and have an acceptable quality of life/level of happiness, all while away from the rat race. But, they live in a closed community, they don't see what they don't have, and they disdain what they don't have as immoral for them.
What about stable native cultures, like of Papua New Guinea? In "Collapse" by Jared Diamond, they're seen as happy and curious. Is this how a stable humanity would be? How can we be stable with so many different people, so many other sides of the fence where grass is greener? A large part of happiness might be the lack of envy found in the ignorance of a better life.
What does the average person do, anyway? They find stable employment they can do and stick with it. It's boring, yet a living. For most it's not even much of a living, just enough to keep them needing to come back for more.
Maybe I'm not cut out for chilling out. Maybe I see the other side of the fence too much. Maybe I need to cultivate the idea that my life is as good as it can be.
My coworker was telling me about his bug-out bag, his plan to buy a four-wheeler just for emergencies. Perhaps his desire for a meta-apocalyptic situation, like a zombie epidemic or gang war, is fantasized about because he wants the change in environment that it would bring. I've known many people like this. The change would rip them away from the stable employment they've been at these years, forcing them to change, to have adventures. None of us want the difficulties of violence and disruption, but we all want the adventure, the upheaval of our lives. Our lives aren't as interesting as those of the characters in zombie movies. They don't have the same carnality or lack of responsibility. This modern life is devoid of the carnal, everything is so clean and polite. It is non-dynamic, a-manual. We want the adventure, the movement, the killing of zombies who were our annoying suburbanite neighbors minutes before. My coworker's preparation of a "bugout" bag, his fantasizing of escape, is perhaps the result of this unconscious desire to radically change his life. To get rid of "the others"; those that enforce the molds we're in, to be free of the rat race created by other's competition, and to escape from the docile passivity of our lives.
But in my reality, in my yearning for adventure and escape, what can I do? Really, can one escape from general humanity, let alone their own? "If you can't beat them, join them" becomes confusing if "them" is "me". "If I can't beat me, I'll join me". Perhaps the answer is appreciation of human nature, of appreciating it in myself. To be, that is the answer; to be the organism and be happy about it. I don't need a cabin of solitude or a bug-out bag, I just need to do as humans do. Perhaps this is the new permaculture: to to die of natural causes after a happy, humanly satisfying life. No need for zombies. I just need to figure out what it is that "humans do".