Well in my opinion the connection is absolute.
What I meant is that, if death is, as the materialists think, truly the absolute end of everything, of consciousness, individuality, memory, love, suffering, identity, and the person themselves, then I don’t see merely a difficulty in explaining the meaning of life, I see the complete collapse of the very idea that life could possess any meaning at all.
From a materialist perspective, every human life is ultimately reduced to a temporary arrangement of matter, which means that a person appears for a few decades, experiences a brief sequence of sensations, desires, fears, and attachments, and then disappears completely. Not metaphorically, but absolutely.
Nothing remains of the subject who lived, as there would beno reconciliation, no justice, and no enduring significance. The universe, according to this view, doesn’t preserve the difference between love and cruelty, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and exploitation, It simply absorbs everything into the same silence.
Jimmy Savile lived much of his life respected, celebrated, protected, and admired, while the full horror of what he had done emerged only after his death. Father Kolbe, by contrast, gave his own life so that another family might live.
Yet if death is total annihilation, their ultimate fate is absolutely identical: both lose everything; both cease to exist; neither knows how history judges him; neither receives justice, vindication, punishment, or peace.
Their moral difference survives only temporarily in the minds of other mortal beings who will also vanish.
Of course, society may remember one with disgust and the other with reverence, but that memory is itself temporary, as humanity will not exist forever: civilisations come and go, languages die, monuments decay, and eventually every human judgment will be erased. If materialism is true and death means total annihilation then even the distinction between saint and monster is ultimately swallowed by the same nothingness.
People often reply that we can create our own meaning, but I find that answer completely unsatisfying, as invented meaning is not the same as real meaning.
I mean…a prisoner may draw a window on the wall of his cell, but that doesn’t mean the wall has opened, right? Calling something meaningful because we desperately need it to be meaningful does not make it objectively so. It may comfort us, motivate us, or help us survive, but it remains a psychological construction produced by an organism that is moving towards extinction.
Under that view, love is only chemistry, morality is only social conditioning, consciousness is only a temporary neurological event, and the self is only a brief illusion generated by the brain: every ambition ends in oblivion, every relationship ends in separation, every memory disappears, every injustice eventually becomes irrelevant because there will be no one left to remember it. The universe remains indifferent, and nothing we do alters its final outcome.
I know many people do not share this conclusion, and I am fully aware that my position is extreme, but I have thought about it for decades, and I still cannot find a convincing alternative: If death means the total extinction of consciousness and individuality, then the idea of a meaning of life seems to me fairy-tale-like: a consoling narrative created by beings who cannot emotionally accept the implications of their own disappearance.
I have probably been unusually sensitive to this question from the beginning, as my earliest memory is of discovering, at around the age of two like I said, that death existed, and being horrified by it, not simply frightened, but existentially appalled by it (and, as a parenthetical reflection, I think this says something profound about the nature of the human person. A child of two can somehow be struck by the horror of non-existence and its implications while an adult gorilla, despite possessing greater developed intelligence than a toddler in many respects, does not appear to confront death in this consciously existential way. To me, that suggests that what I experienced was not merely a cerebral calculation, but something more immediate and profound, a movement of the soul reacting against the idea of one’s own annihilation, and suggests that the difference between human and animal intelligence is not merely quantitative but also qualitative).
I understand that this sensitivity may not be shared by everyone, and perhaps that is why others can live more comfortably with a materialist understanding of death, but to me, if death were truly the end of everything, then life would not be a meaningful story that happens to end, it would be a meaningless interruption between two eternities of nothingness
