Your life is not pointless. Life has no point. That is a different thing to say.

Love has no point. Beauty has no point. Happiness has no point. Good food, stimulating conversation, delicious wine, electrifying art all have no point. That does not mean that they cannot be enjoyable nor are they unfulfilling.

The idea here is not that your life has a point or not. The idea is that the concept of a point itself is a fiction that we tell ourselves.

You may actually be here for a reason. That reason may never be known to you. That reason may be an incomprehensible intricate clockwork that was set in motion billions of years ago. You may be a key cog in that machine.

Functionally, it makes no difference. The reason you are here is irrelevant. Being here for a reason or not, your life having a point or not, these are incomprehensible questions. It's like asking what blue smells like. It's like asking why is a flower.

You simply are. What you do with that is your business. And I hope you do something with it that makes you feel happy and warm. But you will be the one making that happiness and that warmth. Not something outside of you.

The world seems to have been designed for maximum cruelty. I think suicide is a totally rational response to it. But if you decide to keep on living, consider Camus' take on Sisyphus (you know the guy that has to push a boulder uphill for all eternity). He concludes that Sisyphus must actually be happy, because "the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart."

It's almost another way of saying 'a life well lived is its own reward.' You struggle on, and it's not meaningless or pointless because the struggle is the point. Think of Matthew 6: if all that you do is only to attain some reward in heaven, you're no better than the hypocrites who fast just for the attention. Don't look a god to give your life meaning, decide for yourself what life is and what it's for, give your own life meaning, and become as God.

"We are a way for the universe to know itself. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. ... And we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff" - Carl Sagan

As someone raised an atheist (or at least allowed to come to my own conclusions)

I've always found this quote grounding when I drift into nihilism.

I have read plenty of philosophers on this issue; Schopenhauer, Chioran, Camus, so many others....
But found that it pays to be concrete, to take this out of the realm of abstractions, and understand this as a human problem.

Sometimes this works.

I like to think of life as a finite cake.
It is not a very good cake. But the fact it is not infinite, that does not mean I should reject it. So I can choose to eat and appreciate it anyway.

I’ve seen the horrible truth, but my mind simply cannot fully comprehend/accept it, and thus I’m slowly going mad from the revelation.

We are like beavers, we are building a dam. But a flood is coming, and everything will be wiped away.
There is a beavers who knows this, and she tells the other beavers, and they despair.

With their work now meaningless, they stop building the dam.

This is what it means for something to be meaningless: that motivation is gone, that it should be gone.
The beavers, to survive and reproduce, must build another dam somewhere else. Natural selection decides the emotions we feel in response to a theoretical oblivion.

The conflict you feel is not a theoretical or philosophical one, but one of instinct and emotion.
You are torn between a belief that everything will become as nothing, and emotion to give up, and an organism that will search endlessly for new rivers to dam.

There is a link in this chain that must be broken.
It is nothing useful, profound, or necessary to give up on everything you could possibly care about, abandoning everyone you love, and everything you ever laughed about.
The devaluing of life is an instinctive emotional response; it is wrong, and it is evil.

If you can conclude that, then you might find the rational thing to do is stop staring at that oncoming flood.
Not because you are in denial, but because that instinctive response is arbitrary, harmful, and useless.
It is like any other atrocity, there is no need for ignorance, or sugarcoating; but there is nothing to be gained from traumatizing and demotivating ourselves by staring into the abyss forever.
Watching endless tapes of police brutality would not make my responses any more rational.

after it’s over you’ll get to see and be with all the people you’ve loved and lost in your life forever

Some of us were promised infinite cake, and we mourn that loss, and it can weigh heavy upon us.
But we never had that infinite cake, it never existed. We never lost anything. There was never a contract, only a lie.

We did not lose our illusions, but rather saw through them. Fantasy is still available if we wish to have it, to suspend our disbelief is no crime.

You are fighting an emotion, not an idea. You suffer from loss aversion.

Because no matter how hard I try, there’s this part of me that simply can’t/won’t fully accept the possibility that my existence/life really and truly is pointless, even though I know that’s the most likely scenario.

I like to think of life as a bicycle parking rack.
It is just a thing. It has no use beyond itself. But it is still useful.

I like to think of life as a violin concert.
It does not last forever. There is no use for it besides what is inherent. Would you rather be at a violin concert, or just not exist?

If you died, would you choose to be reincarnated, only for short while, to hear and see the violin concert?
I wouldn't mind hearing something like this again, listen to it: Saltillo - Following Evelyn

The dam you are building is the present moment, stretching out into the future.
That is where you will have to find your meaning and motivation.
If the present moment is not valuable, then an eternity of it could not be valuable either.

It’s like being given the softest, warmest blanket you’ve ever felt in your life,

The warm blanket was inside you all along. Those emotions are yours, they do not belong to any religion.

You do not give your life meaning; it does not need meaning, meaning is a spook. A cake, bicycle parking rack, or violin concert does not need meaning.
You are not here to have fun, you are here by accident. If you want a purpose, then make it to fight for what we can have, for what does exist.
To fight for the material conditions that constitute an acceptable, dignified, and authentic life; for everyone, including the beavers.

This is materialism, this is what materialism entails; your thoughts and emotions are the consequences of material facts.
You are not engaged in mere abstractions. Your mind does not live on some idealist plane of existence.
The meaning of life is not an abstract question, it is embodied like all other questions.
And you do not have a coherent definition of meaning with which to pose that question abstractly anyway.

I am adding another song, but give yourself time to process first if you think any of this stuff has mattered to you:
of Montreal - You Do Mutilate?

Raised atheist and can confirm that I handle meaninglessness pretty well. However, I have often in my life looked at religion and thought, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Seeing our loved ones after death? Souls continuing on toward actualization, relieved of their flesh prisons? I’d sign up for that.” I acknowledge those things as a kind of cultural belief, without having any faith that they will literally take place. Still nice to think about, though, and pretend.

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I really think that feeling of meaninglessness is just the alienation of being divorced from our ancient tribal existence. That lifestyle must have offered a deep sense of belonging and purpose that modern life simply cannot reproduce. I doubt hunter gatherers worry so much about meaninglessness. They're probably quite fulfilled by their ramblings through the wilderness with their friends and loved ones. As for religion, I think religious people's beliefs are simply simulating that feeling, both in the earthly community of the faithful and to a larger extent in heaven. Atheists are faced with a somewhat starker view of our alienation. The good news is that your brain is still fully capable of producing those feelings of fulfillment under the right circumstances. I just don't know how to find them in an incredibly alienated late capitalist society like ours.

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it isn't pointless, it's just the task is de-motivatingly vast, especially from an individualistic perspective. which is why we have the comrade stuff.

we need to solve a lot of issues with our planet & societies. Why? because we need to understand existence, in order to determine if there is a point or not.

to understand existence, given our material constraints, we need time - a lot of it, and people, a lot of them. and also technology, because our biological bodies aren't enough on their own.

so we need to solve the issues that take away from our time, and from our resource of people (or in a detached way, having multiple brains working on the problem).

therefore the goals currently, the purpose of our existence is to ensure the survival of the species, & ensure the survival and optimal function of each individual of the species.

given again what we've worked out so far, I think this means we need to find out how to either live forever or learn faster in a lifetime, and also we need to get into space and colonise other parts of it, to be safe.

but capitalism, aristocracy, etc are inimical to species survival and progress toward understanding so we need to revolutionise the world & get rid of them, implement a better way or multiple better ways.

in conclusion there is a definite material point to existence currently, deducable from what we know currently about the world (including that there probably isn't a god at least in the way that most religions mean it). There is a grand task that we should all be working on together as a species, in a number of ways and means. Unfortunately we are burdened by parasites.

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i'd add also that religion isn't just a comfort blanket, that's just a useful outcome of religious thought. there are many truths in theologies, and they're part of how we got to what we know now

maybe look into other religions other than the one you were brought up with, it can be easier to see the truths and ideas in them from a distant/unfamilair perspective, rather than the flaws and sins that you tend to see after being lied to. not to say that some other religion is necessarily correct, but for example buddhism isn't particularly comforting I wouldnt' say, yet many people believe/follow it.

You can be a nihilist, and be revolutionary. When you have literally nothing left to lose, because simply nothing matters, you become very reckless. I'm not saying this is healthy, but yea. I've been looking for a cause to live or die for, and fighting this system doesn't sound like a bad idea, considering how horrible it is for billions of people. I was born in Europe, had access to a decent education and so on, trying to find a way to fight for socialism is the only way I can get any meaning out of all this.

I was also raised catholic. I lost my faith when I was 11 because, despite praying for years prior for some sort of help with what I know understand was gender dysphoria, I never received any sort of answer. It was scary at first. Realizing there probably was no afterlife was terrifying, especially when this was a time in my life where I saw suicide as the only escape from going through the wrong puberty (this was in like 2009 and despite my best efforts, I couldn't really find any resources online for trans kids at the time. Just conservative propaganda calling me a pervert). After a while though I found it sort of freeing. I was terrified that I would go to hell for feeling the way I did about my gender. And once I accepted that there would be no sort of divine punishment, no eternal consequences for feelings I couldn't control, I felt a lot better.

It's the opposite for me. Climate change becomes even more horrifying if an omnipotent being created us and is leading us to that. The idea that we simply exist without any purpose is comforting

I think it's useful to acknowledge that the human mind is incontrivertably predisposed to incredible vanity, such as the vanity of assuming one's life is imbued with some divine purpose. This very common, incredibly vain assumption cohabitating with the impossiblity of finding any evidence of any divine purpose is what Albert Camus defined as The Absurd.

The Absurd is a fundemental human condition, it cannot be dispelled, only addressed in the following ways:

1. Suicide, complete refusal of the condition.

2. Faith in a divine purpose, a refusal of material reality and the utility of critical thinking in life, suicide of the mind.

3. Acceptance, find the humor in your mind always vainly assuming a grand purpose without the possibility of ever finding one, like some megalomaniacal Clouseau that shares your mind.

All our lives we develop coping mechanisms to deal with what horrors life presents us with, but we also need to develop coping mechanisms for the inherent biases that are preconfigured in our minds by evolution. Developing these coping mechanisms can be painful, but I find it's helpful to read about what others have found to see if I can adapt or adopt them for myself.