One of my favorite and most highly recommended snap judgment segments.

https://snapjudgment.org/episode/dadbot/

'being is in essence
a point in the world
and time that can
only ever be oc-
cupied by you.'

in the Known*
Universe

*sadly
currently
that's All we
have to Work with

for now

Why are people so disturbed by the fact that we live once, briefly, and then disappear forever? Life has no ‘purpose’ in the simple sense. If you want to search for ‘meaning’ in your life while you briefly live, knock yerself out. But don't allow this to torment you unduely during your term.

Most of us are just worker ants; trivial, disposable and endlessly replaceable. The emotions we feel while experiencing our lives, the electro-chemical responses to our environment and circumstances, are a story told only to ourselves. These decay along with our rotting brains. Though our ephemeral output may survive digitally, as long as the current formats persist, and while our sum total of personal activity may train new generations of artificial intelligence, even these are doomed to extinction.

If you strive to be remembered by others after you're gone, then you're living on a higher plane. Those whose being is ‘remembered’ even by others who never knew them, and those whose lives affect the lives of others after they're gone, especially indirectly, are perhaps doing something we could call constructive. They are adding to the story of existence, at least. Maybe, just maybe, these people’s lives had ‘meaning’.

Those inspired strivers, whose constructive lives change other lives, affect the story of time. It's a question, however, given the dark, unfeeling universe, as to whether the story of existence has any meaning, except if observed by others. If a tree falls… I think you'd have to believe in an eternal god as an observer of existence, for this story to have any function. Perhaps somewhere, sometime, other beings — gods? extraterrestrials?—learn from existence, or are a little bit entertained from their extra-existential plane.