This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How do atheists think this brief existence is all there is? Don’t you have a yearning in your heart that there must be something over the rainbow?”

That’s not exactly how that works.

This brief existence is all there is for this thing we call “ego.”

This thing we call “ego” is far from being “all there is” and is, in effect, as relevant to the universe as a speck of dust on our planet. The problem here isn’t the insignificance of ego but the ego’s addiction to being (or being perceived as) relevant beyond its existence.

There is much, much more to existence beyond the human ego, but as soon as each life ends, so too does that frail construct that demands immortality for itself on the sole basis of simply recognizing its own existence.

What we should be doing with human egos is learning how to train them to focus on the lives they get so that the benefits of existence are maximized for themselves and through others because that’s the only way for the ego to validate itself within the context of its limited existence.

Pissing away one’s life by catering to delusions of egotistical immortality is the most toxic form of grooming for one’s ego that invariably metastasizes it into a cancerous tumour for human society.

Whatever may exist “over the rainbow” is not for the human ego to experience.

This existence is all there is for the human ego.

The sooner the human ego can embrace that, the sooner it can grow to appreciate a gift that can vanish at any moment for any reason. Appreciation for the finiteness of one’s existence is precisely the point of a limited existence. There is no other way to transcend this limitation.