Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?

[Spongebob]

Maybe learn to use 'me/I' instead of 'you'. You believe you have them authority to tell people when they should be offended or not? I can be offended if I choose, piss off.

No evidence for 'basically true of everyone', obvious evidence that it's true for you. Warn, schmarn away. I never stated that I was unique, just different from you which apparently does not set well. The unknown mind adds little to the discussion.

This does not mean that I don't have my own insecurities and failings, I do, they've been addressed. I just don't seem to share yours. If I say I'm happy then I'm happy (btw, I rarely state that I'm happy). You stating that it's highly likely that I'm not says more about you than me.

The mind tricking people only becomes an issue when it results in negative outcomes and behavior, for the person or people around them. How's that for clinical? (notice that I didn't use you once)

No, you're just imagining things that aren't there, such as me asserting any sort of authority of you.  I said nothing offensive or even controversial.  If you take offense to those things, it says more about you than what I said.

---

I mean we in the grandest sense, all of us, everyday, an overriding compulsion of our species.  All of us used to know how to make the things we needed start to finish.  A hand axe is ubiquitous.  Very few of us know, today, how even one of the simplest components of the things we need come together.  We were self sufficient but impoverished in a vast wilderness.  Now we're comparatively wealthy specialists in little domes of attention and concern.  Effectively closing the curtains on all of this wonder, all of this meaning, while lamenting our loss of connection to it.  Religious ideations appear to have started out as an explanation for that greater world, meaningfully and even truthfully informed by it (at least some of the time), a world to which we were very well adapted - but in urban populations - in this world- it ends up becoming a replacement by circumstance and necessity.  The religion of nature standing in for being in nature or a part of nature.  The religion of a better life beyond this life, the same. 

I think it's interesting that in so many versions of this story..the place we came from and the place we're going to is, for all intents and purposes, a garden.  Whatever we miss, we lost at the beginning, whatever we mean to have ......is where we're going.  We're domesticators.  It makes us happy, provides us with a purpose.  We discover meaning in all of it.  In our pets, our plants, our civilized and cultivated personalities, our penchant for euclidean geometry and manicured spaces.  Maybe this is meaning with a small m - but that's one huge small m.  It checks all the boxes..and yet...here we are - poisoning it, not living up to our potential as partners in life, with life.  Saddled with one life denying religion after another aggressively marketing itself to people who've engineered their own disaffection.

If a better life is good in the next life, it stands to reason that a better life in this life would also be as good for all of the same reasons.  If a connection to some greater thing is a crucial part of the human pysche then we can (and do) have it here...and alot of it, even within the confines of my one small pet m.  You could honestly put late stage full on free market capitalism down as religion-alike.  The promise of a better tomorrow excusing our dumping today.

That's pretty deep stuff.  We do see a lot of what I would call "return to basics" in society today, like artisan this and that and build it yourself attitudes.  I suppose this could be an example.  It makes me wonder if we say similar reactions in times past, such as when the automobile began to replace horses or when factories began to draw workers from farms.