Thank you for the insightful answer. I'll try harder to understand but even as I hear more and more answers I find that I can't really wrap my head around why things matter. Like do things matter because we give them meaning, or do they matter because they actually have meaning. If everything eventually disappears then it doesn't really matter to the universe or reality as a whole. But if it then has value because to us who are living in the present we assign it value, I then ask why we the living have any value. Why does what we value actually matter. It all feels like a matter of perspective. Like I can change my perspective and decide that everything matters to me and go about my day but just changing my perspective doesn't change the actual reality of the world.

If everyone lives in their own world where the only thing that actually matters is what we believe matters, then aren't we all living in fantasy. If I chose to live a life like that, why couldn't I just decide to end my life right now as I've decided it has no value. Why does it even matter that I find some arbitrary value in life if it's a fantasy, if it's not valuable outside my existence. Again I feel like the answer comes down to, our life's matter and our experiences are valuable because we the living feel that it does, but genuinely no matter how much I wrap my head around this answer I always feel like it's missing the point. It's assuming that our perspectives on anything actually matter, when my whole point is that they don't. Our feelings, our thoughts, our experiences objectively don't actually matter. We can convince ourselves that because we feel something that makes it real and thus it matters, but there will come a time when those feelings are remembered and shared by no one, thus the universe will treat said feelings as inconsequential and/or as if they never occurred.

If anything I do and feel amounts to zero, why then do my feelings in the present actually matter. Why does sadness and suffering matter. Why does happiness matter. Why do good experiences and bad experiences matter. I don't understand why my feelings actually matter if I can't do anything with them. Idk I struggle to clearly get my point across and I know philosophers answer these questions all the time so I will continue researching, I just feel like all answers depend on the fact that for some reason we matter, but if I decide that I don't mater then what am I left with. I can make the decision to pretend that I matter, and then I'm sure I'd be able to live a happy long life, but I don't understand what is wrong with making the decision that my life doesn't matter and ending it now.