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Notes -
I want to resurrect a variant of an old question that has got me wondering again. Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it. Obviously, if you don’t dwell on the facts of life, you can distract yourself with various concerns and pursuits. But what if you don’t distract yourself? Someone with a religious model involving a loving God can ponder his existence forever and be motivated and purpose-filled, provided that they forever presuppose a loving God as an article of faith. But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally. How do they do it, do they do it, or are they just distracting themselves?
Eg, “an atheist believes they need to make life count” —> count for what? Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count. So why are you programming your own Operating System as a hobby? It doesn’t count! “But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?
I broadly agree, and though I don't have inspiration to say too much, I will leave a quote that captures our atheist condition rather succinctly:
Why does one need to "distract yourself" or see death as a "horrible reality?" I think this framing is the quote author projecting their own personal fears of their own mortality as something universally shared by others when that isn't the case.
I see this a lot with proselytizers who'll go on about how you need their religious beliefs to cope with fear of death, or to help fill the "hole inside you" or "give purpose to life" and so on like that's something everyone relates to - it's not actually about you, it's about them, their personal insecurities and fears that they misunderstand as shared by everyone else. They reveal themselves to be scared of death, to have a hole inside them, to lack purpose. Then when they encounter people who aren't like them, they work themselves into knots trying to argue that the others must actually deep down feel the same way, be in denial somehow, have not thought things through, etc.
Some of us just don't fear death, and have thought plenty deeply on the subject of life and death.
Idk man, "everything is futile and we are doomed, but it's fine, actually" was never a position I could wrap my head around. It feels...lazy? Indecisive? As if you are shrugging the problem off.
It might be easier for you to relate once you understand that it's not just fear we are talking of. I'm still young and full of vigor and death feels very much remote, but here we are. In the first place, it only took me a couple of years of my adolescence to surpass "obnoxious atheist" phase and think "wait a minute, something's off here"
Maybe our gap in understanding is caused by a missing element, like some inner romantic sentiment, or belief in fundamental human dignity. We are special beings endowed with the capacity to look at the material realm not only as participants, but as observers. And so, I claim, we can look beyond, see the insufficiency of mere matter. We can see that we are in a cage, so we deserve a way out. This here might cause you to raise an eyebrow, and maybe it's not the most logically robust claim, but it's fine. It's my intuitive conviction that comes from deep within, there's nothing I'm more sure of.
If all hopes come to nought and materialism is roughly correct, I'm ready to avow that it is not me, but the entire universe that is sick and misshapen and insane.
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For future reference, this quote is from https://www.scifiwright.com/2012/12/how-to-find-god/
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Frankly, you seem overly dismissive when people tell you their motivation. You can always ask "why?" until you hit a terminal value, and if you effectively answer "terminal values don't count for atheists" well, what am I to tell you, exactly? For every "why?", there is a "why not?".
For me personally, it seems obvious that the universe doesn't care, that there are no intrinsic goals or values and that as a result you've got to make your own or choose a pre-made team that comes with them such as a religion. I hold very little against religions these days, they are a perfectly fine source to derive values from - they're just not the only way.
Your behaviour strikes me the same way as some people who seem not only incapable of playing sandbox games because they don't tell you what to do, but who also thinks lowly of people who do enjoy them. I like sandbox games. I also have no problem of choosing values in this world for no other reason but their own sake, and falling into a spiral of depression due to nihilism seems just stupid to me. I can enjoy live vibrantly and be motivated just fine without religion. In fact, I think you've already simply done the same by choosing your religion, even if you may be in denial about it. I can dwell on the fact that live is intrinsically without pre-determined values and the only thing this causes is a renewed drive to think deeper about the values I want to live by.
Would you play a sandbox game if what you made is destroyed, and in fact you have no memory of ever having played the game? Well, maybe you would play it to pass the time. Is this how you see life, though? If you see life as a way to pass the time, then my thesis that conscious atheism prevents motivation and purpose would be correct.
Surely you can see how I accuse atheists of not thinking about the consequences of their belief fully. What is the “inherent value” of something that will be destroyed and forgotten, never to be seen or remembered, for all intents and purposes being as if it never existed? There will be no observer, no judge, no human, no memory, no trace. Which value is “inherent” yet becomes valueless and forgotten? If there is a value underlying it, that’s very close to theism, and I would just call if God. If there is no underlying value, then it becomes valueless.
It seems to me, and again I’m just not persuaded by the arguments I’ve read so far (but perhaps I need to reread them), that the way out is necessarily that the atheist creates his own faith — the same process as theism, no more “realistic” — or he falls into hedonism, where the only value is what feels good. If the only value is what feels good, this results in humans lying to themselves and others to obtain what feels good, and ignoring anything that’s for a longterm social good. It means there’s no purpose in any moral training, because we’re only going to do what feels good. And it means ignoring the suffering of others because by ignoring if I feel good.
The sandbox game in this scenario is all I have, pretty good, and I don't remember ever not playing it. Why wouldn't I act as if it's the only thing that matters?
We say that something matters because of its consequences. “Life matters” is obvious from the standpoint of maximizing pleasure — pleasure is real, I like to feel good, this is obvious. What’s not obvious is why a thinking atheist should care about such things as:
the lives and happiness of others
longterm betterment of humanity
improvement in any way that does not lead to more pleasure
society at large
doing anything “good”
“important” issues in politics and culture
The consequence is that I saw it (or foresaw it), and I saw that it was good. These issues bring joy to my heart whether I accept that it's the prosocial genetic instincts and memetic indoctrination, or I don't - and choose to convince myself of religious stimuli instead.
If you’re just assenting to memetic indoctrination, you’re halfway to theism already, because our culture is still upheld by the residue of religion. A “thinking atheist” would not simply do what others tell him. That’s my point.
If it feels good to do good things, I think you’ll find that people choose the goodest feelings over rational analysis. This leads to virtue signaling, people dumping money into failed charitable projects, etc.
Why not, if he finds that he prefers the world where he followed the rules over the one where he didn't? You're just substituting an edgelord psychopath for a "thinking atheist". But even psychopaths understand the value of good habits and good reputation, especially thinking ones. And while religion did take over as the substrate of prosocial memes for a long time, I see no reason to view it as the origin.
Suppose I really do believe that prosociality as I see it will lead to maximal flourishment of humanity, including, yes, more pleasure.
In the absence of objective morality, or in other words, a final judgment, then a thinking person would not “prefer to follow rules”. Why would they? They would prefer to feel good, right? What would be the point of feeling worse, if there’s no reason to? They would not conclude that following the rules leads to feeling good, because every time they have the choice of either following the rules or feeling good, they would choose feeling good. To prioritize rules over feeling good, following the rules must have existential importance. Otherwise what would be the purpose of following the rules?
But, perhaps an atheist can will himself to believe that following the rules actually does have existential importance. I intuit that you might have done this, as you go immediately to “lead to maximal flourishment of humanity”. (There is no reason to care about this in atheism, because it doesn’t matter. It feels good to give to someone you like, due to evolutionary prosociality, but it does not feel good to construct rigid systems of maximal flourishment of humanity, which is artificial.) I suppose I agree an atheist can have this kind of faith. But at that point, they might as well maximize the benefit of faith by believing in a Just and Loving God.
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It is equally not obvious why a thinking Christian theist should care about any earthly affairs and do not concentrate only on saving souls from eternal fire. In theistic universe, all worldly things will soon perish with no consequence, while hell is eternal.
Christians do not have the power to save souls from eternal hellfire. Each person chooses whether or not they want to accept salvation, and by far the best influence you can have on their decision is to be genuinely involved in their lives. If they are concerned with earthly affairs, being involved in their lives is going to require you to be at least a little concerned with earthly affairs as well. Being a Christian does involve putting a hard cap on how concerned one is with earthly affairs, though.
Well, how many Christians' concern with worldly life crosses the line (and by a lot). It seems the case of overwhelming majority of them.
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Certainly caring more about earthly affairs is an error I'm prone to, which I must constantly try to resist, and a lot of people calling themselves Christians don't seem to be on the right side of the line. On the other hand, I'm not confident that either of us can rigorously identify where the line between "making a good-faith effort" and "only pretending to try" is, and I'm certainly not confident that most non-Christians even understand what Christians are aiming for.
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A thinking Christian would consult the Gospel as a guide, where he would find that God actually wants us to celebrate and be happy in honor of his glory, as well as to reduce the suffering of others. But a more general point can be made. Can we devise a teleology where purpose and motivation are maximized? Such that a person dwelling on the purpose of things and the nature of life can actually be motivated toward bettering the world, and not say to himself “well I will be dead so who cares”? Yes, we can. The easiest way is to believe in a loving judge, something shared broadly among theistic religions. Another would be a reward or punishment cycle based on deeds, which is the karmic wheel.
In the theist worldview, while the material world is fleeting, human action is immensely important — every action will be accounted for. Therefore there is motivation to behave according to a standard.
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I had the bad fortune to visit my local major city this weekend. I got to see many drug addicts up close. I wouldn't call them happy. If anything most seemed downright miserable.
I think I'll keep living an atheistic life with admittedly finite and temporary meaning and consequence. Not eternal meaning and validation given by God and experienced by my immortal soul, but instead just a limited material life with finite meaning and purpose.
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Belief in god is orthogonal to the question of the meaningfulness of life. It is possible that it turns out that there is some absolute discoverable meaning to life that has nothing to do with any god. I don't know what that would be like, but I have had some, for lack of a better word, "mystic" experiences pointing in that direction. And I do not think that all mysticism is theistic. Likewise, it is possible that belief in god actually makes one's life seem less meaningful. Some personalities find the notion of being under the rule of some all-powerful entity to be an unpleasant thought.
Living vibrantly is its own reward, it feels good and, assuming that it does not hurt others, does not need to be justified either by morality or by appeal to some higher goal. The problem with drugs is that they have unpleasant consequences. Also, to the extent that some of them sometimes distance one from reality, they hurt one's ability to enjoy truth.
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Note, Asian religions are almost atheistic and don't give you a particular purpose either. Moksha and Nirvana hardly sound like an appealing motivation. Yeah, let's aspire towards nothingness. It's a hard sell.
As an atheist who derives his atheism by disassociating from an Asian religion (Hinduism) , I struggle to understand why followers of Abrahamic religions think that religion is essential to purpose or motivation.
Yeah. That was still true when I was brought up in a religious household. Would you say that practitioners of Indic religions (hinduism, buddhism, jainism) similarly confuse you ?
Do they ? In the short term sure, but it's pretty hard to find consistent happiness through drugs or idle consumption of any kind.
Haven't enough atheists done this already? We have decent stack of atheists around the world, who have thought deeply about life and continued to feel motivated to live well till their dying day. It's not exactly a new phenomenon.
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I am an optimistic nihilist. I can see absolutely no reason to believe that humans have any objective "reason to live", but am perfectly content without it. I continue living and seek to live longer because I intrinsically enjoy living itself. If I didn't, I wouldn't aspire to live to at least the Heat Death of the Universe.
In the absence of any objectivity here, nor any reason to think it exists, I have no qualms about taking my own subjective preferences and giving them all my attention. To aim for more is, frankly, a foolhardy endeavor, leaving aside that the comfort of meaning from religion is delusional.
If anyone has a genuine God-shaped hole in their soul, then I can only pity them, and hope we find a way to fix the problem because God isn't real. I'm grateful that I came out of the factory without that particular problem.
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One reason is to motivate groups of people to live out their chosen meaning together. Which is much more powerful than choosing a particular one for your own, in my experience.
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This is precisely why philosophers go with "human flourishing" instead of happiness.
Once you accept that happiness is not unitary or reducible to just hedonism this hardly seems a question.
I think this just moves the question down the line. Of what purpose is human flourishing? If flourishing is important because it makes humans happy, then happiness is the point. What is this thing that makes humans unhappy that they must do out of obligation, and what underpins it in the face of the inevitability of extinction of all humans across an infinite time span?
"Flourishing" is eudaimonia/"happiness", it's just that translating it that way for moderns seems to bring to mind hedonism or fleeting emotions. Which is how you get the drug question. Or humorous misunderstandings like this.
If you don't take happiness to be the mere sensation of pleasure at any given moment (which always abates and you will always want more of) "why do drugs?" has an obvious answer
Well, because part of my flourishing is cultivating a variety of virtues and capacities - health, discipline, familial relations, friendships - that are all correlated with my well-being and, ugh, "happiness" in a deeper sense. Taking drugs provides me with short-term hedons but harms my ability to do that and may make me - and those around me - much unhappier in the long run.
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As an atheist, I know that it's possible for dwelling to end up like that, but I don't think it's the only possible result. The key for me is to actually read what other people have said and done, really dig into history and philosophy, and there are endless interesting threads to follow. By contrast I feel like the religious tend (not always) to be in a sort of cloistered existence where they don't really engage with the world and literature in a way that doesn't reassure them of their own faith. That existence seems much paler compared to the richness of being open to all sorts of opinions and experiences. Rather than cancel each other out I think the diverse and contradictory experiences of the world add up to something fascinating, there's just no easy answers and the meaning is harder won, but more real in my opinion than the womb-like experience of the devout.
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Dinosaurs did count. If it comes to pass that 67 million years from now, tiny creatures that I could have eaten gaze upon my remains in awe, I will have considered my life a success. God or no God, this is a fine accomplishment.
I do the ones that I think will make me happy. Drinking is fun and I love beer, so I drink beer. Coffee is delicious and caffeine is effective, so I drink coffee. Nicotine is enjoyable and cigars are tasty, so I smoke cigars. I don't think this is all that compelling of a gotcha for the godless. Hard drugs won't induce eudomonia, so I skip them.
I'm sure I miss some important experiences that Mormons have in their belief, but I can't induce that belief organically and I seem to do fine as I am. Just based on observation, I would say that I'm closer to living vibrantly and maximally than the median theist, so I'm more that a little skeptical of whether religious beliefs are central to that life well-lived.
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It is completely unclear what you mean by living vibrantly and maximally. If I devote my life to creating art and music for others to enjoy, does that not count? What if I devote my life to reducing suffering in others (human or otherwise, such as people who rescue abused dogs)? What if I spend my life in the pursuit of knowledge? None of those require religious faith.
All of those things require that you believe life has a purpose, or else completely ignore thinking about human life as a whole. A reasonable person does not spend a decade building a house that will be immediately destroyed, draw on a canvas that will be immediately incinerated, or donate a kidney to someone who is immediately going to die. Those endeavors must have a point. Can you explain why an atheist would spend time reducing suffering if none of it matters once all human life has passed away? And if there’s no moral reason to ease another’s suffering, because there is no actual moral judge and in any case no one cares about the moral failings of ancient Assyrians? You can get away with literally everything because you will die and it doesn’t matter.
Even if human life passes away, the suffering is real now. There is no reason to privilege some future state in which the person is dead over the current state in which the suffering exists, as if that future state makes it unimportant to change the present state.
I am the moral judge. Am I an omniscient, absolutely perfect moral judge? No, but I am a moral judge and my thoughts about what is right and wrong are not irrelevant.
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Are Buddhists reasonable?
(Also: high-end chefs may feel they're making art, but it's surely of the ephemeral kind)
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Well, obviously because it matters now. And, just as obviously, to an atheist, now (ie, this life) is all that matters, because now is all that exists. You need to try to reason from the premises of athiests, not just from your own premises.
"Immediately" is doing a lot of unearned work there. And, under that logic, it would seem to be irrational to buy a toy for a child with terminal cancer. Heck, it would be irrational to give him pain medication. If your logic leads to that conclusion, there is probably something amiss.
Edit: Btw, you seem to have changed the subject. You have not explained why an athiest who spends his life rescuing abused animals is not "living vibrantly and maximally."
“Because it matters now” and “because current life matters” begs the question. I can ignore human suffering and focus on my own pleasure, and then I will have more pleasure, and there will be no consequences because we will all die and be forgotten. And I feel no guilt or shame, because I am doing what I want to do.
That is a good question: why do palliative care to a child with cancer? I mean, I can completely ignore that whole cohort of humans, and be content with my own pleasure. Then that cancer patient will be dead and it will be like they never existed. There is no one to judge me, so why bother? And if someone else judges me, again I can ignore them. If they press on, I can lie to obtain their social validation. This is where thinking atheism takes us IMO. Life becomes like a video game, where people make alliances and then break them for fun. And IMO, atheists find this repugnant and so develop their own faith — disorganized and ad hoc, but of the same quality as theists.
Another question is why we would care about creating new human life. We can take all those resources and make our lives as pleasant as possible, and then humans will cease to exist. But we would live like bachelors.
Well, go ahead. You are making theists sound pretty unappealing as people, though, I must say.
Why would I care about how I make theists look? If nice Christians were all it took to convert then everyone in Amish country would be Anabaptist. In any case I am not trying to persuade someone to theism but explore how “thinking atheism” is inherently non-motivating
You're doing some funky stuff with the definition of motivation. Your promised, never-seen pleasure in heaven is Deep and Meaningful because it won't end, while mine quite obviously existing pleasure on Earth is shallow and hedonistic, is that what you're trying to say?
What I am getting at is that the things which we value most in life — betterment of things, morality — do not seem to value in a thinking atheist worldview. If a thinking atheist wakes up every morning to dwell on the nature of life, there is no reason for him to pursue betterment or morality. A theist who believes in a Loving Judge, however, will be motivated toward betterment and morality. In a hedonic philosophy, if feeling good is the only motivator, then we can do things like ignoring guilt to pursue more pleasure. It becomes very easy to lie to others to obtain what we want. In Abrahamic religion, the very foundation of human life is a repudiation of this temptation — man tried hiding from God only to be discovered, naked.
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I am not sure why you are talking about focusing on one's own pleasure. AFAIK, that is not a principle of atheism.
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Yes, plainly. There are many examples.
When Lacan said "there is no big Other", he didn't mean "God doesn't exist". He meant that, even if God exists, God is not the big Other either. God's just as confused as we are.
It's not clear why the introduction of God is supposed to make life more meaningful in the first place. He could torture us for eternity if we don't follow his commands; but that's just coercion. Similarly, you could be motivated to live virtuously so you can be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven, but it's hard to give an account of Heaven that doesn't reduce to either empty hedonism, or a simple continuation of the types of good things we already have on Earth. Pleasure and pain are things that we already know well; and if pleasure and pain aren't enough to make our finite earthly existence meaningful, why would an eternity of pleasure or pain make life suddenly change from not-meaningful to meaningful? Certainly anyone can see why you would be motivated to avoid eternal torture, but is that the same thing as meaning?
I think we can dispense with the idea that eternity by itself is what makes something meaningful. You can imagine a hypothetical universe that contains nothing but a single electron, and this electron persists for eternity. Is the electron's existence "meaningful"? Doesn't seem like it. So there has to be something else, beyond the mere fact of eternal duration, that makes an existence meaningful. But then we can start to question whether this "something else" might not be available to a finite existence as well.
A more sophisticated theist might say that God is the ground of certain sui generis facts about meaning and purpose, and these facts exist over and above any of his other properties or actions. God simply makes it the case that certain things just are meaningful, end of story. But if you endorse an internalist account of reasons for action, you might question whether such free-floating normative facts are coherent in the first place. Even if you've been informed that God has simply made it the case that some things are more meaningful than others, it seems like there will still always be an open question of why you should care. You might say, "that's very interesting that God has done that, but I don't see how that can be relevant to me personally. If God will torture me if I don't follow his commands, then I certainly should follow his commands; but in that case, I'm responding to the threat of torture, not the alleged 'meaningfulness' of the actions themselves."
All this is simply to say that God is not the big Other. God himself can always take a step back and ask "you know... what is it all for, really?"
An equivalent formulation might say, "there is no escape from philosophy".
But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.
The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.
Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.
No, theism/atheism is orthogonal to the question of morality. An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others just as well as a theist can. That is, of course, unless you think that anyone who believes in morality is by definition a theist. But I do not think that this is what you mean in this thread when you refer to believing in god.
Certainly, one does not need to believe in eternal life to believe that some things are morally more right than others.
Can they do this while dwelling on the facts of their worldview? My point is more specifically that while an atheist may perform moral judgment in a distracted sense, being a social organism in a greater whole and internalizing moral judgment as such, their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences. This is in sharp contrast to theism, where continuing to dwell on one’s worldview is sought out and leads to more motivation and moral action.
Why?
Because ultimately all of humanity will be forgotten, meaning what happens has no greater significance, and when you die what you did will not matter, as you will cease existing. If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Thus, when dwelling on the grand scheme of things, you cannot sincerely maintain motivation and purpose.
... Why? Why does moral importance require taking up a share of the universe's lifespan? Human experience is already 100% of what humans can ever experience. Whether you find that imporant or not, I do not see how a long existence of gas clouds before and afterward makes any difference. Do you think your life would be more "meaningful", whatever that means, if you found out that the universe was created 150 years ago and will be destroyed in another 150 years? Do you think a person who lived in the Upper Paleolithic, when there was only about a million people on Earth, had 8000x the moral value of a person living in the modern world, with its eight billion inhabitants?
If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe. In human life, when something has no greater significance, like we make a medicine that was ineffective or we build a building that collapses, we say it was meaningless. If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.
If I will die, and every human will die, then what I do has no greater significance because it is only temporarily affecting things that will disappear shortly. Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for? It’s almost the same thing as if I do heroin and then face withdrawals — temporary happiness that doesn’t matter. What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science. So I have no need to listen to my moral impulse and can completely ignore it for my own gain, as if I’m playing GTA. The only duty remaining is to feel good, because only pleasure is real. If someone tries to shame me (which feels bad), I can pretend that he is wrong and that I am right. We already have humans doing this today in fact!
It’s a worldview that can’t help but breed dysfunction if you actually dwell on it. Like yeah, you can ignore the atheistic truth, but then you might as well develop some theistic view for fun. An atheistic man who confronts the ultimate purpose of things head on would say: “I exist as an accident, there is no greater significance to morality, morality is an accidental instinct that I can ignore, and I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.”
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There's no such thing as the grand scheme of things. We are our own infinities of the highest order.
There is a techno-optimist narrative that there is a real possibility, large enough that a VC would bet on it given the size of the payoff, that the Great Filter is in our past (or is in the near future, with a slim-but-real chance of crossing it - the Yudkowskian view on AI), we see no other signs of a civilization that has crossed it, and accordingly given the potential impact of a supercivilization, humanity is the most important thing in the observable universe. This is a major source of meaning to the longtermist-EA crowd in practice, and in a weaker form is a very obvious source of meaning that everyone involved is space exploration talks about.
The fundamental narrative is more general - most religious source-of-meaning narratives are of the form "humanity is special because God made us special" and this is a secular version. It can be relied on by anyone who is part of the load-bearing infrastructure of human civilization (including parents) or who thinks they are.
The old jaibot blog (jaibot was the bard of the early Berkeley rataionality community) recently disappeared, but he had some excellent inspirational posts of this type.
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Speaking as such an atheist (or something close to an atheist), well, yeah, there is a portion of me that sometimes thinks about life, and comes to the conclusion that life is all about distracting yourself. And I choose to distract myself.
I don't think drugs or most things that will make you "happy" easily are that appealing, because they don't really make you happy. I know this because there were times when I drank or smoked too much in college and felt strung out. Anything that's addicting starts to feel bad in some way, you feel bad when you see you are acting differently and shamefully, and you feel that the happiness it gives is short term and false in some way. You can feel that your brain starts to crave and expect it more, and you can't keep up with it all the time, and if you try, you suffer physical effects. Heck, even watching porn or playing video games too much will make you feel that way. It's pretty apparent to me that if I did harder drugs, it'd turn my life into a nightmare, and the pleasure it gave wouldn't last long before turning into pain and problems. It is not pleasurable at all to spend all your money on drugs, live on the street, resort to prostitution, and have to struggle to try to live another week.
Then there's also pride and shame. Even if we know all of it may be constructed and somewhat meaningless, we are social beings. I respond to the thoughts that if I killed myself or became a druggie, the people I know would be ashamed of me. I don't really want that, even if I think that their lives are as meaningless as mine. It's just the way social animals are, we are optimized to care about that.
I should also say, for what is worth, that I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I do have pascal-wager-like thoughts. But I sort of think that if my life is going to end anyway, why end it now, and why have it be shitty? May as well at least try to live a "good" life if all of it may not matter anyway, but also may matter.
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