In a universe where everything is ineffectual does this make moments precious and worthy of reverence or do we require a more apathetic approach? — Benj96

The purpose of each human's life, to the extent there is one, is the experience of that life. The inability to face that is what religion and philosophy are all about. — T Clark

How does this influence your perspective on life and humanity? Human life is like an etch-n’-sketch. You can draw for a brief moment what you will, but eventually time shakes the board and whatever information you set in concrete will gently erode away to nothing. — Benj96

[A]bout human extinction; that's ineluctable nothingness – the radical contingency of the species, its fossils & histories, and our bloodied parade of civilizations – an echo of sighs & moans, laughter & screams fading even now and forever into oblivion. Music is made of silence, which merely interrupts with sudden soundscapes, each piece (i.e. an ephemeral world) ending like raindrops in the ocean. It's terrible knowing, feeling bone deep, that everything and everyone we ever knew and loved – and that we never knew or will never know who also knew and loved or will know and will love – will one day very soon in the cosmic scheme of things be utterly forgotten as if all of it, all of us, had never existed.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
~Percy Bysshe Shelley

And knowing this, how can this recurring nothingness have not already happened in the sense of being a priori – the very structure of our minds, that is, what enables us to think at all? Think what? Think the 'before there were any thinkers and after all thinkers are gone' ...
Think what? Absence (e.g. Democritean void). It's the blindspot that enables vision. Silence that inspires – calls for – music. Space that allows touch and motion. Oblivion – extinction (i.e. contingency) – that drives thinking to 'think no-more-thinking'. I forget who quipped Man built civilization in order to distract himself from the abyss; thus: 'we are for now, ergo we think' here & now – this is all there ever is.

We are – this entire world (or galaxy) is – just one candle out of countless trillions of other candles a-flicker in this boundless void, barely illuminating oblivion, which, perhaps, before winking-out at last, we may light another wick with all that we ever were. — 180 Proof

In a universe where everything is ineffectual does this make moments precious and worthy of reverence — Benj96

or do we require a more apathetic approach?

In a universe where everything is ineffectual does this make moments precious and worthy of reverence — Benj96

. Music is made of silence, which merely interrupts with sudden soundscapes, each piece (i.e. an ephemer — 180 Proof

A father reassuring his child is trruly important at the scale of the child, but will be insignificant to, let's say, a tribe in South America, or to the Sun, or to Andromeda — Hello Human