The OP writes: "I do not believe that the ethical theory of hedonism represents the world in which we live truthfully, neither does it appeal to my common sense."
What represents the world more deeply is the drive for mastery, striving for control of one's environment (as every life form does), solving the puzzles of life. And beyond Freud's pleasure principle and death drive, the drive of the drive, as sketched out below, concluding that the ethical theory of getting life in order represents the world in which we live truthfully.
First quoting from Heidegger's Off the Beaten Track, he writes that Nietzsche sees value as that which is life-promoting, stimulated by the work of art that is life.
Pages 170 & 171
In a note (1887/88) Nietzsche states what he understands by value
(The Will to Power, no. 715): "The viewpoint of 'value' is the
viewpoint of the conditions for preservation-increase in regard to
the complex structures, relatively enduring, of life in the midst of
becoming."
... By the very way he writes this — in omitting
the "and" and substituting a hyphen for it — Nietzsche intends to make it
clear that values as viewpoints are, in their essence and therefore constantly,
simultaneously conditions of preservation and increase.
Page 180
The creation of the possibilities for the will, possibilities which
enable the will to power to free itself for itself in the first
place, is for Nietzsche the essence of art. In accordance with the
metaphysical concept of art, Nietzsche does not, under the rubric
"art," think exclusively or even primarily of the aesthetic realm of
artists. Art is the essence of the willing that opens perspectives
and takes possession of them. "The artwork, where it appears
without an artist, e.g., as body, as organization (Prussian officer corps,
Jesuit order). To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage.
The world as an artwork that gives birth to itself" (The Will to
Power, no. 851, from 1888).
The essence of art, grasped on the basis of the will to power, is the
fact that art excites the will to power toward the will in the first
place and spurs it to willing above and beyond itself. Because
Nietzsche, in a faded echo of the ζωή (zoe:life) and φύσις
(phusis:nature) of the early Greek thinkers, often refers to the "will
to power" (understood as the reality of what is real) as "life," he is
able to
say that art is "the great stimulant of life" (The Will to Power,
no. 851, from 1888).
Picking up on the drive for mastery, Derrida teases out a sense of satisfaction beyond the pleasure principle, in The Postcard, page 325.
... after this paragraph (Beyond II ¶7) Freud does not simply renounce the PP
(pleasure principle). He tries twice more, after the final resigned
suspension of it in this chapter. 1. He tries to see in the active
assumption of a passive situation (since the child is unable to affect
his mother's displacement) a satisfaction (and therefore a pleasure),
but a satisfaction of a "drive for mastery" (Bemächtigungstrieb),
which Freud curiously suggests would be "independent" of whether the
memory was pleasurable or not. Thus would be announced a certain
beyond of the PP.
This positive motivation is combined with the more troubling 'death-instincts' (in Beyond VI ¶19), to arrive at the meta 'drive of the drive', on page 405.
Beyond the pleasure principle — power. That is, posts (positions of power). But even so, we
will not say, despite the transcendental function to which we have
just alluded, beyond the death drive — power — or posts. For it is
equally the case that everything described under the heading of the
death drive or the repetition compulsion, although proceeding from a
drive for power, and borrowing all its descriptive traits from this
drive, no less overflows power. This is simultaneously the reason and
the failure, the origin and the limit of power. There is power only if
there is a principle or a principle of the principle. The
transcendental or meta-conceptual function belongs to the order of
power. Thus there is only différance of power. Whence the posts.
Beyond all conceptual oppositions, Bemächtigung indeed situates one
of the exchangers between the drive to dominate as the drive of the
drive, and the "will to power."
Further elucidated by Francesco Vitale in Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, page 162.
Even if it is always urgent and pervasive, the drive for power never
accomplishes itself as such or as an absolute power; it has always to
negotiate its hegemony with other forces in the field ... Perhaps the self, too — the constitution of the self — could be
wrestled away from the drive for power in view of another binding
(individual or collective, as it would be either living or elaborated
by the living).
Awareness of this basic disposition and mechanism enables one to play to one's strengths. To pursue goals for satisfaction rather than pleasure, and apply the phenomenal tenacity of problem solving (positive aspects of the repetition compulsion) to solving real-world problems.
