I think you might just not be understanding the scale of pain that feeds and holds up our modern society.

Imagine spending your entire life in a dark enclosed space, knee-deep in a mixture of your and surrounding humans' waste, being kept awake 22 hours every day from their moans of suffering. You have been genetically modified to maximize output of something irrelevant to your own interest, the side effects of this modification cause you to suffer physically all the time in addition to the mental stress. It's crowded, you have no freedom, no romance.

This is what human society has come up with so far. What about if everything gets optimized exponentially further in this direction by an amoral AI?

I think you just don't understand how bad things would get if important people thought the same way as you. Being a nice guy is not a bad thing. Because this is a real possibility in the future I don't care about "losing" some societal competition today.