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A fellow atheist asked me, "How do we keep from being depressed believing life has no purpose?"
Here is my reply:
I agree that not having a purpose can be unsettling and depressing. But purpose doesn't require a god. Anyone can declare the purpose of anything they do.
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There are certain concepts that I've never been able to buy into, one of them being an "ultimate purpose in life".
I find that many (if not most) or people that I meet don't know the meaning of words, and don't follow the chains of assumptions behind them, and so get lost in a morass of meaningless (literally) abstraction.
Please bear with Captain Obvious as we look into this.
If we can generally agree that the word purpose means "the achievement of some specified, chosen result", then it behooves us to ask why.
Why questions are really about our values. Values are simply "what is important to me?", literally and simply: something we value.
So as to an Ultimate Purpose, the question really is "what is ultimately important to me?".
When people say "we all have a purpose", I often get the sense that they intend the notion of a Great Mystical Destiny--being the one to find Excalibur, to change the world, to go on a hero's quest or to be influential in some aspect of the world.
In the end, even the greatest purpose is equivalent of your pumping gas: to meet a need, physical or psychological.
So how does your friend deal with the depression of this? By realizing that if it is a Great Destiny they desire, that the choice--therefor the power-- is their own to accept, reject, act on or ignore.
Liberating one's self from the notion of destiny being bestowed unto them by some Great Power (which is in fact a victim mentality position) is the greatest life-enhancing and joyful thing a man can experience: freedom.
Additional and tangential thoughts.
Many people fear true freedom. True freedom implies taking responsibility for everything in one's life, including the consequences of our actions. It also means giving up the comfort of peer group approval derived from conformity.
Fear of ostracism is instinctual in humans. We have a choice: Habituate ourselves to the excitement of facing the fear, or cower into conformity.
The pros of facing this excitement, is feeling alive, a greater sense of adventure and joy, better relationships and if we choose to learn, ever-increasing skill levels, which makes what we previously feared seem inconsequential: a virtuous cycle is formed.
The cons of facing it are that initial clumsy attempts may cause us to blunder into the very ostracism that we're facing, and if we're especially blunderful, may lead us into stupid acts that have grave consequences such as jail or death.
The pros of not facing up the fear of ostracism are the low-level and circumstance-dependent levels of a sense of security--feelings. I might go so far as to call this The Delusion of Security.
The cons of not facing up to our fear is to spend our short and unique life in a shell without having even risked living the life we dream of.
I can think of no worse hell--and that would be depressing!
The above reminds me of a quote by Nelson Mandela who is far more articulate than I can be about it. I'm sure that one can take a moment to look past the theistic imagery and into the meaning.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us: it's in everyone. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
— Nelson Mandela
In the end, the very lack of a pre-ordained purpose, the freedom to live what we want, as we want and to the best of our ability is more than the very reason to not only not be depressed, but it is a reason to anticipate, create, celebrate (and alliterate!).
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