You spend your time on the planet, as a walking, talking, self-important meatbag wrapped around a shit pipe, trying to enjoy life and maybe make a new one who will remember you into the future. Then your heart stops beating and there's nothing but total blackness and you no longer exist. Life goes on for maybe a few thousand (or hundred) more years, until inevitably planet Earth is either consumed by our own sun, or obliterated by a supernova --- rendering everything mankind has ever achieved or created erased in an instant.
As someone who doesn't follow any religious ideology, this is what I see as the truth of our existence. We're just a biological accident that sprouted up because the rock we're on was the correct distance from the sun and everything means nothing. Knowing this, I should just stop paying my pills, leave my wife and kid and spend the rest of my days in hedonistic pursuits...but I won't do that, nor will most men who believe the same things. Why is that? That's the real question.
Sometimes I envy religious people because they're at peace with an afterlife which doesn't exist.
If there was an afterlife, I would think of it as living a lifetime inside your mind during the moment before you brain finally shuts off -- kind of like that movie Jacob's Ladder, except hopefully without the freaky demons chasing me around.
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