It's not just you, polymath257 -- I've felt that way for nearly 50 years now.
Around age 10-11, just as I was heading into puberty, I went through a weird mental state that in retrospect was probably a major depressive episode. I used to come home from school in the twilight gloom of winter and spend time just lying on my bed, thinking about stuff.
One day I had a vision: I started thinking about time/space, and suddenly saw myself outside the universe, looking at both the physical entities such as planets and galaxies, and at a timeline that went an infinite distance in both directions. I imagined civilizations being born, flourishing, degenerating and dying, and realized that it applied to all of them. I took a step back and saw it happening to entire planets.
One more mental step put me into the perspective of gods and of eternity, and I realized with a start that eternal life could never possibly have meaning solely by virtue of its infinite nature because it was impossible to get to "the point of it all."
My worldview never did recover from that particular tilt, but as I got older I realized that the present moment is the only place we actually live, and the only place that one can experience meaning and purpose. That took me in the opposite direction from nihilism, to a place where simply being in the world and engaging with it is meaning enough for me.
Around age 10-11, just as I was heading into puberty, I went through a weird mental state that in retrospect was probably a major depressive episode. I used to come home from school in the twilight gloom of winter and spend time just lying on my bed, thinking about stuff.
One day I had a vision: I started thinking about time/space, and suddenly saw myself outside the universe, looking at both the physical entities such as planets and galaxies, and at a timeline that went an infinite distance in both directions. I imagined civilizations being born, flourishing, degenerating and dying, and realized that it applied to all of them. I took a step back and saw it happening to entire planets.
One more mental step put me into the perspective of gods and of eternity, and I realized with a start that eternal life could never possibly have meaning solely by virtue of its infinite nature because it was impossible to get to "the point of it all."
My worldview never did recover from that particular tilt, but as I got older I realized that the present moment is the only place we actually live, and the only place that one can experience meaning and purpose. That took me in the opposite direction from nihilism, to a place where simply being in the world and engaging with it is meaning enough for me.
