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Notes -
This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.
How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.
It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?
This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.
Others have commented advice and armchair diagnoses. I would agree, and suggest you stay talking here even if you're not slinging it out in the political threads.
Your ennui is familiar to me and appears in cycles. The difference (perhaps) is I have spent another decade investigating what can pop me out of it. I have a suite of activities and people that are reliable sources of semi-religious joy, and have mentally exercised enough to silence or survive the yawn of the god-shaped hole when it appears.
Put another way, it could get better. Even if it involves some lame bullshit like medication or therapy! I'll echo self_made_human and say it's worth a shot.
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I agree with @Corvos that this is a clear ringer for clinical depression. I'd know, I'm clinically depressed and a psychiatry resident.
The facts are facts, but the implications can vary widely. Do you want to spend your life feeling like a clock slowly coming unwound, as the world blurs into a grey smear around you? I don't.
The world lacking "objective" meaning is all the excuse I need to make my subjective one all that matters to me. Even if the universe cools and congeals till each hydrogen atom is alone in the observable universe alongside dying photons redshifted till eternity, I want my time in the sun to have mattered. To me.
It doesn't have to be this way. I can't force you to seek help, but I can recommend it. What have you really got to lose?
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I'm going to be presumptuous and intrusive, but this sounds a lot like depression to me. Especially coming from someone who's 23. I get where you're coming from, of course: I feel that way sometimes and I think that everyone does, but if you're feeling that way the majority of the time I think this is a problem which can and should be fixed.
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