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Your problem could be summarized as follows:

> If your protagonist's life is really totally perfect in any way, he has no reason to change anything. End of story.

So if you want to have a story, then the protagonist's life must not be perfect. It may *look* perfect, but there is still this one little detail that disturbs the perfection. And that one little detail is what drives your hero to do something about it. Which ultimately leads him into the direction you want.

So the formula might look as follows:

>   * The perfect world isn't really perfect. There is a seemingly small problem that is solved in the way you want the story to go.
> 
>   * The solution at first seems to work → positive feedback
> 
>   * But it doesn't work as well as originally thought → more is needed.
> 
>   * More effort means more investment (higher stakes), but also more gratification for parts that work out → a positive feedback loop
> 
>   * Due to the positive feedback, the whole thing slowly morphs from being a means to an end into being an end in itself.
>
>   * The shifting priorities finally drive him to put at stake the very thing the desire to protect originally drove him into action.

For example, his life is perfect, except for this one beggar that always sits in front of his house. He may see that beggar only as annoyance, but the true reason he does so is that deep inside he knows that the little bubble he built for himself is not the whole world, and this beggar is the outside world disturbing his little perfect bubble. He knows that the big bad world may at some time burst his little bubble, and that is a danger he doesn't want to be reminded of. But all that is not at his conscious level; the conscious part is just, there's this beggar in front of his door, and the beggar annoys him.

So he has a seemingly small problem to solve: Get the beggar away from the door. Now there are many ways. He may call the police and have the beggar removed. Or if he is truly evil, he kills the beggar and hides the corpse.

But your protagonist is not evil, he's in his heart a very good person. A person who would frown on the thought of the police removing that beggar by force, because after all, it's not the beggar's fault. So he finds an easy solution to get rid of this beggar without having a bad conscience: He just pays the beggar for not sitting in front of his door. He is happy with this because it's a win-win situation: He no longer has the beggar in front of the door, and the beggar gets money, and doesn't even have to beg for it. And he certainly can afford it.

Except that there's a problem. Soon another beggar starts sitting at his door. Now he can do the same solution again, but he realizes that this would be a temporary solution again, and he has simply not enough money to pay all the beggars to go away.

Therefore he starts to thing about a more general solution: If there are no beggars to begin with, there are no beggars sitting in front of his door. Again, he's not the man who would advocate for forcefully removing the beggars from the town or similar; also through his previous action he is already primed for solving the problem through helping. So he starts thinking about how to solve poverty, because without poverty, there are no beggars.

But to do so, he also must invest more effort. Effort that might not pay out. That is, stakes. Also, he might piss of others that are not as kind, and would prefer the police solution to begging, and who fear that solving poverty will worsen *their* lives because it costs money.

And as he fights against poverty, he loses sight of his original problem, the beggar in front of his door. Seeing beggars turns from the primary problem to be solved into a symptom of the actual problem to be solved. He no longer fights poverty because he hates seeing beggars. He now hates seeing beggars because it means he still hasn't successfully fought poverty.

And with fighting poverty now being his primary goal, he is willing to risk the very living style that he originally tried to protect by fighting poverty.