I keep hearing from people in my life that spirituality is an essential part of living a meaningful existence. I hear the phrase “let go and let God” and “everything happens for a reason” used a lot as advice and comfort. However, I’m an atheist and a materialist. I don’t know how I could even be spiritual with those beliefs. At the same time, my life is not fulfilling despite the fact that I am not struggling financially. Moreover, I feel paralyzed when I try to get off my privileged ass and do even the bare minimum for socialist organizing because I realize that it goes directly against my labor aristocratic class interests. I feel like knowing that sticking my neck out and contributing to the real movement to change the present state of things is the morally correct thing to do isn’t enough to drive me.
In short, what is spirituality? Is it compatible with materialism? If so, how? And if spirituality is the wrong tree to bark up, how can I drive myself to do what is to be done?
Spirituality in the atheistic sense is just how you process of the objective meaninglessness and ephemerality of your existence and everything you create. Different atheistic responses to this range from nihilism to existentialism to enmeshing yourself in a collective project to build something that will outlast you. Death, the permanent cessation of conscious experience, is undeniably horrifying to an atheist and how you use its inevitability to inform your life choices can be thought of as being spiritual.