*sobs* Nooo, why Dirk why, sacrificing your own sense of self just for ‘happiness’ is never worth it :C This is the wrong kind of ‘destroyer of heart’! (plus this is going to wreck non-Trickster Roxy<>Dirk, thank you so much peer pressure and half-hearted surrender to romance, but that’s almost irrelevant at this point) Oh Dirk, I’d rather they’d hit you with a large blunt object than you giving up like this D:
The reason Dirk did this was very telling, and you might have been able to understand in retrospect. He isn’t just leaping recklessly into an “ooh, let’s just be deliriously happy idiots” line of thought lightly. Hell, Dirk is even perfectly aware that everyone’s drinking and insane, and in serious danger of “giving up” in this session once and for all, in the state they’re in. He knows that giving in might get everyone killed.
What you need to understand is this:
Dirk Strider is fucking miserable.
His relationships were falling apart. He’s been trapped in a session doing nothing but embarrassing himself in front of Jake, reining in his Auto Responder (doing a shit job of it at that), and generally becoming more and more irritated with who he is - as a Prince of Heart might suffer, becoming disillusioned with his individual uniqueness - to the extent that he hates himself enough to nearly commit suicide.
He almost murdered his Auto Responder for being a copy of himself, just earlier! That’s how miserable he is! He literally feels he has to be “too fucking cool” to be happy, and it’s killing him.
So, when the choice was between actively attempting to beat the crazy out of his friends - when not only can he not explain the crazy, but he thinks more highly of all the friends he’d be hurting than he does himself, and doesn’t see sparing himself as worth their pain - and accepting an invitation to be inexplicably and deliriously happy for once in his life, he unfortunately chose the latter.
It helped that Arquiusprite persuaded him into it. Not only are both of them part Destroyer of Heart, willing to erode the effect of individual inclination and uniqueness over reality, as you mention… but Equius is an Heir of Void, one who invites change in Void particularly in the sense of ‘submission’. He invited Dirk to submit to the others!
