But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty world really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace which the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, be made to lie down in green pastures?

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

Strictly speaking, that’s the logical conclusion of seeing clearly in a world where nothing “matters” in any cosmic sense. If life is short and ends in oblivion, why not just believe whatever makes you feel good and be done with it? Why not take the spiritual fentanyl?

A thinker, Nietzsche says, is the creature in whom “the impulse for truth and those life-preserving errors clash for their first fight after the impulse for truth has proved to be also a life-preserving power.” The old opposition — cold truth versus warm illusion — won’t quite do anymore. The appetite for truth itself can become a way of living, even a way of consoling oneself. You can take pride in being the sort of person who stares at the rictus grin on the face of existence without flinching, perhaps even while smirking. You can make a little ego-cult out of not needing the green pastures.

That, I suspect, is where a lot of unbelievers end up, myself included. I don’t believe in souls, afterlives, or a creator god keeping score, but I still behave as if there were such a thing as truth — lower-case and provisional, perhaps, but not wholly plastic — and as if harmonizing with it offered a satisfaction you can’t get from being your own sycophantic courtier. Even if “truth” isn’t another name for God, it serves much the same function: something that stands outside me and corrects me, something I can fail to live up to.

Of course that, too, may be one more life-preserving error. But if I’m going to live on stories, I’d rather live on the story that says: see as clearly as you can, refuse the deliberate lie, and then, knowing full well that nothing lasts, help build and protect a few small oases of decency and meaning anyway. Not because they’ll endure forever, but because a world of sand castles honestly built is still preferable to a Disneyland of comforting fables.