The (nonhuman) animal predicament is particularly revealing. Confronted with the awful spectacle of billions of animals being eaten, often alive, by … - David Benatar

Meaning from the cosmic perspective would be good for extensions of the same reasons that meaning from the other perspectives is good. People, quite reasonably, want to matter. They do not want to be insignificant or pointless. Life is tough. It is full of striving and struggle; there is much suffering and then we die. It is entirely reasonable to want there to be some point to the entire saga. The bits of terrestrial meaning we can attain are important, for without them, our lives would be not only meaningless but also miserable and unbearable. It would be hard to get up each day and do the things that life necessitates in order to continue. One writer has sniffed at this suggestion, saying that the “idea that the natural consequence of finding one’s life meaningless is to commit suicide is somewhat ridiculous.” In fact, however, failed social belonging is, at least according to some, the most important factor in predicting suicide. Failed social belonging is one consequence of perceiving one’s life to have no meaning from the perspective of some other humans.

Consider another analogy. If you are worried about your father’s health, it does not make you less worried about his health if you are told that your mother is entirely healthy. It is obviously good that your mother is healthy. If she were not, you would worry about that too. However, being told that you need not worry about her health does not diminish your worry about his. Similarly, while things would be much worse if our lives lacked any meaning, those who are concerned about the absence of cosmic meaning are not consoled about that by the observation that at least some kinds of terrestrial meaning are attainable. The point can be expressed another way. I may derive some meaning from helping another person, and that person may derive some meaning from helping a third person, but that provides no point to our collective existence. We can still say that human life in general is meaningless sub specie aeternitatis. There would be something circular about arguing that the purpose of humanity’s existence is that individual humans should help one another. Moreover, even if an individual human’s life has some terrestrial meaning (perhaps by helping others), it does not follow that that individual’s life also has cosmic significance.

It is not surprising that we fail to notice this heavy preponderance of bad in human life. The facts I have described are deep and intractable features of human (and other) life. Most humans have accommodated to the human condition and thus fail to notice just how bad it is. Their expectations and evaluations are rooted in this unfortunate baseline. Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard. The same is true of knowledge, understanding, moral goodness, and aesthetic appreciation. Similarly, we expect recovery to take longer than injury, and thus we judge the quality of human life off that baseline, even though it is an appalling fact of life that the odds are stacked against us in this and other ways.