I think we can only ever really understand ourselves as humans in relation to other humans. Our individual ideas about who we are can only form in context of our ideas about who other people are and in relationship with them. This is an open system where meaning is an emergent property. Life create meaning, order and structure in the context of complex systems. This is a force as powerful and pervasive as entropy but much less understood.
Meaning exists outside of ourselves.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but attempting to create meaning strictly in relation to others is no panacea for existential dread and the fundamental nihilism of what I, and the OP, believe to be reality - that is, a strictly physicalist universe devoid of metaphysical or supernatural forces or beings.
And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain. And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility: For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen, And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.
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I've never been entirely clear on whether Sartre intended this or not, but it always seemed glaringly obvious to me that the problem in Huis Clos was not that they were trapped for eternity with other people: it was the specific other people they were trapped with. People who magnified all their own flaws and threw them back in their faces.
If, instead, you were bound for eternity to people with whom you shared mutual respect, understanding, and commitment to each other's happiness, that would be heaven.
It is not truly that "hell is other people", whatever Sartre might say. Isolation is the worst punishment we have in this lifetime. Being condemned to an eternity of isolation would truly be hell.
Even if you started out with people you couldn't stand, and spent aeons torturing each other, what's to say you couldn't then come to some form of co-commitment to happiness with them?
Heaven and hell are defined by how we interact with the people around us.
We _want_ to be able to say that suffering and pain imply meaningless, but I don't think that is consistent with a purely materialistic understanding of reality. It is what it is - that's all that can be said.
The materialistic view takes an epistemological stance that precluded the possibility of the metaphysical. That's not the same thing as the actual non-existence of the metaphysical. Fiat money, power and the nation state are all concepts that don't have material existence yet these are realities non-the less. The material world doesn't set the limits to reality, just the context.
Even if you see humans/society as just really complex versions of a cellular automata (or composed of nested automata) you can't deny that the emergent properties are more meaningful/significant than the material realities that compose them. The material world isn't a panacea of meaning either.
That's the most dumb thing I ever heard since the last conversation I had few days ago about asexuality. It's equivalent to the same argument I heard which was "people are asexuals because they don't have sex more often" or "you're straight because you didn't tried anything else besides that".
I don't know that there's a way to escape heat death either, but my answer to that is: So what? I don't see why that should make me a nihilist. Nor do I really see why deciding to try to prevent suffering through veganism should follow from any of the above.
Instead I'd rather continue to muddle along my path. Leveraging what ability I can to make enough money that I can do whatever it is I feel like doing and end up going to bed happy. And that involves eating delicious things and having good times with the ones I love and doing drugs and drinking and contributing to charity and whatever else.
It doesn't, really, solve any of my problems. It doesn't, in and of itself, make me 'happy'. But I'm okay with it.
What makes me happy is the drugs.
On an unrelated note, is your grandfather a preacher or your grandson?
Seems that this view of human existence as something inherently temporary underpins a lot of nihilist thinking. However, there is a lot of scientific evidence in favor of eternalism (i.e. the philosophy of time, as opposed to presentism) if you only care to look.
For one, it seems to me you have to basically reject all of relativistic physics if you want to maintain a perspective on the universe where only the present moment exists. This is because the relativity of simultaneity tells us that there is no such thing as a universal present moment. How can only a single moment exist when there is no such thing as a single moment?
I think a lot of people who despair in nihilist thought would do a lot better if they simply updated their understanding of universe from being stuck in the 19th century.
Humans do extremely poorly in relativistic environments because we tend to become expanding clouds of atoms at the energies needed to make relativity relevant to every day experience.
At the energies we can survive at a universal time is an extremely good approximation to your daily experience.
Turned vegan too, but not for ethical reasons. Saw the movie Game Changers and immediately switched. I want to live a long healthy life.
I was was happy to discover that evolutionary biologists have similar ideas. I think of myself and other humans as naked apes with a mind which is on the one hand extremely weak (If the elephant wants someting else, the rider is powerless) but on the other hand able to believe in ideas which are detrimental to its' own health. I think the meaning of life is the same for humans, bacteria and all other living beings: survive and procreate, nothing more. For many minds this does not seem to be enough, for me it is.
Just to apply reductio ad absurdum to the anti-natalism argument: If there was a virus that would prevent all animals and humans on the planet from reproducing, leading to the quick extinction of all consciousness, would that be a moral good?
I'll also mention it's important not to confuse anti-natalism w/ pro-mortalism.
The better question is why aren't you having children as often as possible if you think life is worth while. On average any fertile couple can produce around 12 children, if you're not on track to have that number of children but think that life is so grand then why aren't you?
The difference between you and me is that you're ok with not creating 9 to 11 lives during your reproductive age, I'm ok with not creating 12.
I'll have enough children to sustain humanity and keep consciousness in the universe, having 2.1 children still means a potentially infinite line of descendants, so no reason to have 12. 12 would decrease the average well-being, while having none would decrease it as well.
Also, I would be interested what you think the crucial difference is between not continuing to live and not being born.
It is the difference between killing two children and deciding to not have 10 extra ones.
So I ask you again, would you prefer not to have been born? And if yes, what's your argument for continuing your own life?
People that exist have wants.
I exist, yet the dozen other children my parents could have had don't. You can ask them if they want to have been born, but they don't have an opinion on the matter.
Which part of that do you have trouble with?
That's a pretty weak "gotcha" as well.
The reason I have had 3 children instead of 12 is because it balances my interest and desire to be a parent with the work/cost of doing so.
I doubt anyone's decision to reproduce is centered around bestowing the maximal amount of meaning to the universe.
It might be a long shot, not maybe you can find some peace in it...
Update: ...and if stoicism isn't your thing, maybe epicurism is...
But there were a few absurd reductions in what you said, including the idea that the prevention of suffering is tenable yet somehow nihilistic.
Would it not be more sustainable to focus on spreading joy instead of preventing suffering? That way you won't drive yourself crazy focusing on the negative aspects of humanity.
In other words, religion is wonderful for those for whom it works; the same goes for existentialism (our meaning comes from within) or really literally anything else that gets you through the day.
Every morning we wake up and the vast majority of us decide to not jump off a tall building. Why?
They grow up having meaning of life, and all the rules to follow to get to the better place. You don't think you just follow.
When you break out of shackles of religion you are faced with reality, you are responsible for finding the meaning, you are responsible for creating rules for your life and to follow them.
Its my pet peeve when I hear 'atheists are just lazy and left the religion because its easier'. When its the opposite. A godless person that understands that concept of god (more precisely any god that people claim exists and talked to them via various means) doesn't make sense, is burdened with all complexity of life without mental shortcuts religion provides.
All that said, de-converting into atheistism doesn't automatically translate into lifelong misery.
I grew up very religious and when I lost my faith in my 20s, I tried to replace it w/ absurdism and existentialism, but couldn't shake the notion that lives deep in me that ultimately, even if humanity spreads across the cosmos and we're able to find meaning in our own individual existences, the universe will inevitably suffer heat death, from which there is no eternalistic escape.
These days, my morality entirely stems from the reduction and prevention of suffering, which is ultimately the only moral currency we have.
This led me to veganism and anti-natalism, as the best way to prevent individual suffering is for the individual to never exist in the first place (see: David Benatar's Better Never to Have Been; or Ecclesiastes 4:2-3). Needless to say, these are wildly unpopular philosophies. In light of this, I began to come to the realization that we're all nihilists at our core. We embrace religion or other philosophies to ward it off, because it's a truly uncomfortable sate of mind, as the author notes in this post, and the only alternative is total misery until we die. And then, depending on your philosophy, perhaps a true eternal bliss awaits you in paradise! How convenient! The happy people among us are the best at this practice - lying to ourselves successfully about the true nature of reality. We don't care what gets us there, as long as we get there.
All this to say: I was much happier when I believed in God.