Meaning

i meant to make this yesterday but i accidentally closed my browser while working on it and the post was lost. i didnt feel like making it all over again but i do now. recently, i have been arguing with a few theists and their argument this time is "nothing we do matters if no eternal afterlife exists." this is my counter argument: does my bed matter to my water bottle? of course not and why? because meaning requires a mind. its subjective. for a thing to have meaning, there must be one whom its meaningful to. we give things meaning. this is easy to demonstrate. you give meaning to everything because of an afterlife. therefore the afterlife is also meaningful to you. i dont give meaning to anything after life at this point, because i think this life is all that matters while im living it. objective meaning is impossible. also, if there is an afterlife, then i think it makes this life meaningless. we assign meaning or the amount of meaning something has based on how rare it is. how valuable it is to us depends on how rare it is. all those one time special moments in your life, think back to them. how many times have they happened? how long did they last? can you remember a time that is special to you? i guarantee its probably special because it was a time that you will never live in again or a moment you will hardly ever if at all experience again. nobody thinks going to work everyday has meaning. poor people think food is meaningful while the rich dont think so because they have it everyday. things we experience often arent as meaningful as things that are a once in a lifetime experience. this clearly evidences how the rarity of something generally determines the meaning of something. i also contend, that this is why life is so valuable, because it doesnt last forever. when somebody puts a gun to your head and says "you have 30 minutes to live." i promise that suddenly, those last minutes will become the most precious thing in the world and you will do whatever you can to get out of it. same thing with terminally ill patients. the basic point im making is, if we have eternal life after death, then this life and everything will be meaningless ultimately because eternity is a very long time and you cant kill yourself if you're immortal. i personally think that both heaven and hell would be torture. but more so in heaven. in heaven everything is perfect, if we were all perfect then there would never be any sadness and no sin would be able to be done. our imperfections make us human. happiness is perhaps the thing that matters most to us or has the most meaning so to speak. we cannot have happiness without sadness.  concepts exist only because there are things in contrast with those concepts. i know what a star is because i can see where a star isnt. i know what death is because i have seen life end. if no life ended, "death" would not be a thing. life would just be an axiom. axioms in my opinion are just concepts with nothing to contrast with. also, it has been scientifically demonstrated that boredom is the number one cause of depression. tests were done (i forget who by but im sure you can find them) and they deprived people of their senses, its called sensory deprivation. its actually a form of torture. take away sight, sound, feel, and taste as well as smell and leave somebody there, (people volunteered to do this) and within a few days they became suicidal. our happiness is clearly determined by external stimuli.

so now we come to the conclusion. if life lasted forever, we would eventually get bored of everything after having done everything millions or trillions or innumerable times. nothing would have any meaning because everything would be forever. after everything had lost all its meaning and everything had become boring, we would just be wishing we could die. unless we were perfect, then it wouldnt be us because we as humans arent perfect. our imperfections make life worth living so we always have room for improvement. our finite lives are that much more valuable and meaningful because they are finite.