Life is incredibly nice and beautiful and meaningful for many people, most of the time.
Life is also terrible, cruel, sad and worse for many people, most of the time. Sometimes the same people and sometimes unlucky.
The physical world that shaped causality, and threats, and entropy, and death, and evolutionary pressures that shaped our bodies and minds, and our enemies and competitors and parasites and viruses, doesn't care what life is like. , or how life is perceived, by the sentient beings who live in it. That's it.
We see cruelty as a lack of empathy, the distinction between threats, the virtue of our actions, and the personal consequence. But nature is not cruel. That's it.
It's a strange world, but it all makes sense on some level. We are all ghosts, living in a reality that follows simple rules and some complex rules.
We have a few choices in this matter, how to act, how to figure things out, and how happy we choose to be. We can learn the laws of nature and try to exploit them, overcome them. But our choices are also part of the physical world, and so are the choices of other humans who are trying to play the system to their advantage, all constrained by our physical limitations and biology.
I would say it is a strange world, but it is a very ordinary world. We are weird.
I think we can choose to collect the good things in life. As I type, looking around my desk, I'm surrounded by amazing technology – Bluetooth headphones, a giant computer display, gifts from Hawaii, fossils from a few hundred million years old, artwork, some beautiful clay by indigenous peoples pots and some from Japan, exercise equipment, scent diffusers, cleaning products, books by great authors, an impatient little dog, a fermented drink, imported dry pasta, and a 20 kilogram cube of nearly pure tungsten.
As for collecting things, memories and connections, we humans tend to be amateurs.