When I am around other people I am more likely to concentrate on the practicalities of being happy instead of the abstract study of personal worth. I understand that none of this probably has much to do with serious depression.
Well this is not very far from what Camus effectively landed on, the acceptance of the absurd. There's a lot that's simplified and removed from your statement, but I think you would find a lot more to agree with in Camus than you might expect. He was certainly not a nihilist or solipsist.
EDIT: To clarify, Camus thought the opposite of the grandparent comment, and was not on team suicide.
I strongly suspect that others pondering the Camus question of suicide are similarly alone or asocial. I encourage everyone to get busy in social doings -- it does a lot to take this off your mind and let you live life normally.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007K9W0KM/
It's a nice rational introduction to Buddhist thought on happiness, which I thought might be relevant because of their acknowledgement of 'Dukkha', i.e. 'suffering'.
Camus continually uses the suicide allegory for philosophies that don't answer the question of the separation or alienation of the absurd character (us) from his own play (our lives). Hence the "stranger". For example, religion, as Camus delivers, is a type of philosophical suicide. Only the French can present such an unpallatable morsel with such fantastic grace! :-) If Camus' work is not a triumph of philosophy, it certainly has few rivals in style.
Camus, for me, is the hope we lost in the classical pessimists. (And, yes, I say pessimists like it's a good thing. Which it is!)
(Post script: I hear Camus' words as echoes of Rumi when he implores the stranger to regain his identity as a first class citizen of the Cosmos. Like the Buddha too said, we ought to imagine ourselves one with the universe ... we have to imagine ourselves scornfully happy!)
I agree that your prescription will help the malaise, but isn't there a solution other than "be ignorant and blissful"?
I salute you sir! This will be my new philosophy of life.
And indeed, life being meaningless, then that fact is also meaningless (along with every other fact). Any meaning we humans "find" in our life is an illusion at best. One may select and change one's meanings as one wishes, which in all honesty, appears to be exactly what humans do, with abandon. Unfortunately this leaves us precisely where we started: nothing has changed other than that we now permit ourselves to change meanings at whim.
I prefer an evo-devo view. E.g., concerning "courageous or cowardly": these are culture-specific indicators that may assist your reproductive efforts; they likely do matter in that respect.
"He who dies with the most toys wins."