Atheism and the meaning of life - what drives you?

[LadyForCamus]

I don't think it's necessarily nihilistic - more like vague.  I can see how "experience itself" may have no meaning.  Experience is a thing, a utility, it's circumstantial, and without a referent ..meaningfully empty.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean.

For most of life there is no such thing as experience. I'm not a professional, obvs, but suicidal ideation or feelings of worthlessness and a lack of meaning tend to be interpreted as signs that a person is having a rough time.

But you agree that experience itself could be rationally considered meaningfully empty, so I don’t think it follows that I, or you, are necessarily having a “rough time.” Perhaps it’s simply that that rationally derived conclusion about experience provides added context to how I’m informing myself with regard to the value of having any experience at all. 

I'm not too concerned with it's acceptability, but I wonder about it's accuracy.  Is it really true that you have no meaning and have no way to assign meaning.  Is that not something you feel and do?  It's one thing to feel and do x and have questions about it, or reservations about it, to wonder about the justifications or epistemic limits of a given notion..... quite another to say that you don't have and can't do x.

I suppose that I know that I do something; laugh with my kids, enjoy a nice glass of wine, go to the beach, spend time with my mom, etc. I’m just not sure that those things are the thing x that I doubt. Does that make sense?

I'll give you a fun example, and pick a bone with misanthropy at the same time.  From the grasses point of view, the plow isn't for humans to grow crops to eat.  It's for one draft animal to manage another draft animal to prepare a seedbed for the grass.  The tools we have for working the land are all designed to benefit some other species.  Their shape and composition are determined by that other species.  From the grasses point of view, we're not an unnatural scourge destroying the land, but the most competent natural force for disseminating grass seed.  We have a similar relationship with livestock and structures, and at the macroscopic level with all of these variables and complex supply chains.  What beavers are to lakes, we are to grassland (and life is to us..we're also a tool in the shape of a niche).  Now, we don't think that grass has a point of view, that it experiences, but even so..all of this is going on in mere reality all round it.  If people went the way of the dodo it would be unfortunate for the same reasons that the dodo going that way were.  To put a fine point on it, we've been neglecting this category of meaning for so long (and so hard) that it's become an existential crisis.  Does it mean something that we've shit the bed this hard?  If it doesn't..if there's no meaning - no harm no foul.  We can continue along as ever until the last one of us chokes on air we can't breathe under a sun we cant stand on a planet we can't even fully express our natural selves on.  Where all those threads of relationship have been broken and so, by definition, there can be no meaning to life in and of itself then, even if there was some meaning before.

I mean, if humans went extinct, we’d simply be extinct. No one would be left to have an experience or an opinion about it one way or the other. It would just be an inconsequential fact of a universe that does not concern itself with us or anything else. Is that somehow, inherently “bad?” Why? Why is it unfortunate that the dodo went extinct? It certainly is no inconvenience to dodos now. While there may be environmental consequences for species extinction, there is nothing intrinsic about extinction that will bother the individual thing that went extinct. I honestly can’t tell if I’m terribly crazy or terribly wrong, lol.