You raise a good point. If nothing is special, what's our motivation, our purpose? Maybe our purpose becomes being comfortable with no purpose, and I am surprisingly okay with that. I know that my existence is finite, and the time I spend and what I do with it give it importance. For example, spending my time teaching people how to make telescopes, keep a garden going and growing, and train dogs in field exercises would give it meaning. In the short term, figuring out how to use LLMs to take power away from oligarchs would be a good use of time.

Spending more hours working to make somebody else rich, yeah, no. Let's go through the archway in the forest.

This terrifies me but I suspect you are correct. My abject obsession with not being viewed as less fuels my drive to create, earn, produce. I may have to learn just to be. To sit with myself, and just be OK with being.