Once you start making the effort to "wake yourself up"-- that is, be more mindful in your activities -- you suddenly start appreciating life a lot more.
At Vassar College, in the 1980s, the argument was usually framed with a thought-experiment: Imagine that you wakeup in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine and soon realize that if you disconnect yourself from the machine, the person in the next bed will die.