I personally don't think belief in an afterlife should be necessary to believe it's worthwhile to not be shitty to people.

"What goes around comes around" suffices for me.

Call it "ethics", call it "maximizing outcomes for all involved stakeholders", call it "karma", "good business", or "kindness"...whatever you call it, I don't think it's difficult to find your own personal justification for it if you want to.

> "What goes around comes around" suffices for me.

As you say. Best wishes, in any case.

When friends and family and acquaintances think of your name after you are gone, will they miss you? Then congratulations, you probably lived a good life and contributed in positive ways to humanity.

I guess the question is: Do you want your time here to have impacted others in a positive way or not?

> Then congratulations, you probably lived a good life and contributed in positive ways to humanity.

This seems thin gruel.

Sorry you feel that way.

The universe is meaningless and the world is cursed. Sentient beings are the ones ascribing meaning to the meaningless, uncaring universe. You have only a short amount of time while you can do this. Once life is finished, you just become inert matter.

Curiously enough, I don't think this invites nihilism. The opposite, really. The difference between kindness and malevolence exists because we perceive a difference, and give meaning to actions - they are either kind or malevolent.

If we can give meaning to things, it is imperative that we do so, and act accordingly. It is out little defiance to the great enveloping cosmic nothing.

> The universe is meaningless and the world is cursed.

Certainly a possibility.

You seem to assume that you can only have a meaning to life if there is an afterlife.

Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story.

You may ask "but what does it matter if we are all dirt". It matters to them, even if there is no godlike perspective above it all. To be honest, I'm not actually sure why having an afterlife or some super-being would create any more explicit meaning for an individual life.

One can make the argument that certain religious practices would help a person realize what OP is feeling all the time about morals, not just in front of their death bed.

Lots of replies here about after life, and just doing the right thing because you're supposed to or "empathy", yet there are a set of people like OP who only observe this when their life is put in front of them for review, maybe they do need religion?

> Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story.

This is a reasonably assertion as far as it goes.

At the risk of being a dripping faucet, I'm poking at "Why?", given an inevitable return to the dust from which all came.

What's wrong with "because of social and evolutionary pressure"?

"Evolitionary" implies some direction and execution scope, does it not?

Possibly I'm guilty of over-reading the word.

How does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does.

Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.

I don't find it contradictory to subscribe to both an individual Destiny and an "universal scope" Destiny of which the individual Destiny is a component.

This Destiny is in tension with Free Will (in my telling).

In retirement, my hope is to produce a lengthy, pretentious exploration of a few ideas that will doubtless help someone's insomnia.

Right, but any identification of the Ultimate Purpose is going to be a very vague bad guess. I kind of like "to learn", but besides that I tend to keep returning to a string bag of mixed values that won't boil down to anything neat.

The reason I don't think Destiny can amount to more than a "very vague bad guess" as an intellectual matter is that such a solution would tamper with Free Will.

So, how does this outlook work? What's free will (or Free Will)?

What I will argue is something like Plato's Tripartite Soul[1] with the proviso that these are orthogonal dimensions.

Free Will, in this telling, exists on the logos/eros plane of the individual.

Destiny is some target on the plane out there at infinity toward which one navigates over time.

The origin of this coordinate system is the heart, and one may or may not hold a connection to the Creator via the thymos.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_theory_of_soul

Possibly you're over-reading, but definitely you didn't answer my question.

More explicitly, then, "evolutionary" implies some grasp of a direction toward which things evolve.

Otherwise, it's just so many chemical reactions.

Evolution does not imply direction at all. Only change under selection pressure. There is no direction things are moving towards.

Serious question: how can one be sure that there is "evolution" occuring?

that's what I thought if you don't believe in God then the only sensible option is to maximise your function while you still breathe.

What I'm questioning is how we got to 'sensible' here.