Philosophy with Cap'n Coconuts

[GothGirlGangBlasterMaster]

while it's true that on the scale of billions of years we won't have much effect, it's completely pointless for living creatures to operate on that scale. a person can make decisions that affect people for a month, a year, a decade or even a lifetime. it's because we only live for a short time that our decisions have meaning. if you or i can have a lasting positive impression on a person's life, we should be proud of that impact, even if the people we influenced will also someday die.

But that positive influence you've had on them will die with them unless there's a higher purpose for it that transcends nature.

yeah i know
but that should be perfectly acceptable to a creature that will also die.

there's simply no reason for us to think on the scale of hundreds, millions or billions of years when we only live for a small fraction of that.
basically I'm saying you have to flip your thinking to understand the Naturalist perspective. instead of: "nothing i do matters because i only live a short time," you ask the question "if i only live a short time, what can i do that matters?" that's some counter-postive If Q Then P thinking for all the philosophy students in the audience.
and that gets back to what i was saying before: if you live 75 years and you make an impact on a person that lasts 75 years of their life, that's still a massive accomplishment for a human.

basically what i want to get across is that a purpose doesn't necessarily need to be something conveyed by a diety or spiritual entity or whatever. we can pick our own.
that would then lead into discussion of what constitutes a good or bad purpose, which has been discussed for centuries if not millennia.

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