Modern Life is Rubbish?

A recent Radio 4 discussion programme, Mid-summer Sins, invited the public to vote for an 8th, deadly sin.
Their choice?

"Apathy."

It's certainly a good one to add but what will ever drive us out of this apathy? Since I've been a wee boy I've always been interested in space and the idea of aliens etc. Sometimes I think that the discovery that there are other worlds out there with intelligent life living on them is the kick up the bum that the world needs to buck it's ideas up. Bizarrely, the late
Ronnie Reagan famously thought this too :

Reference -

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0102/25/cgs.00.html

" REAGAN: Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war? "

(It took me a while to find a legitimate quote for this amongst all the UFO/Conspiracy web sites, I had started to wonder if he really said this).

Such a discovery would also certainly put the wind up religious folk in particular.

Similarly, the previously mentioned article on Bush's strength being the simplicity of his vision ties up with this desire for something simple to aspire to in an increasingly complex society. A lot of people don't want choice and complexity and want to return to a simpler world with less complexity. Without religion, it's hard to get that sense of being shown the way. To me this is also played out in the trend towards packing in your job and going traveling or starting a farm or self-sufficient "Good Life" type lifestyle - The desire to be in control and to deal with less complexities is coming to the fore more the more complex we make our lives.

It could be argued that religious fundamentalism is a desire to see the world in a black and white simple way, and to live your life according to a few simple rules rather than have to deal with the myriad choices that modern life presents us with. Living used to be hard as a matter of hunter/gathering survival - Now, we make it hard for ourselves by buying into a system that enslaves us into a cycle of work to finance purchases that don't make us any happier?