If Life is Meaningless Anyway, then What's Wrong with Religion?

[henryp]

Analogies are dumb, because there is no incentive for the other person to partake if they are just an argumentative person rather than being interested in discussion.  At the same time, that's how my mind organizes ideas.  Probably leftover from basic logic where you just stick in A's and B's into the equation to try and break it.  Not conducive to communicating with folks like you, but it's what I've got.

What I hoped to achieve, is to flush the idea out for myself mostly.  Maybe it adds to someone else's thinking.  

And for me it worked, because rather than a picnic analogy, or a video game analogy I passed on, or a long thing on misapplying meaning, and social conditioning and a bunch of other stuff, I truncated it all down to:

Endings can be satisfying.  

That's the idea I think you're missing with your unhappy/mentally ill position.

Endings can only be satisfying when they are restricted to experienced instances, not to individuals. Therein lies the problem with your analogy. You are trying to equate the ending of a picnic with that of a life.

Do you not think life is an experienced instance?