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.