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everything will end up as one gray mass
Yes. One day, we are all going to die. We are all going to end up in the same place. Dead. And your "accomplishments" will mean nothing besides what you have left behind for your offspring. You are the product of your parents. Money and accomplishments can not be taken to the grave with you.
What I am saying is live the life that you want. There is no such thing as a "true calling." Human beings place such a great value on their own lives when we are merely just another warm body to walk the earth. The quality of your life is the quality that you create. Nobody is "destined" for shit. That sounds like some religious nonsense.
The particles that comprise us today, will one day occupy the heavens as stars. Father time, father to us all, will see it all dust, then castles, then dust again. Nietzsche's Ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Given an infinite amount of time, every entity will be reassembled. But what does this mean? This mean that whatever we do, will be repeated at some point. Infinitely. So when you do it, make sure that you do it with your full heart aligned behind it. Don't do half hearted shit, telling yourself "It doesn't matter, we will all die in the end. Everything I can leave behind will vanish as the earth is swallowed up by the sun." Know that the vastness of time and space will recreate every moment of your life infinitely. This is determinism, which to you might sound like religious nonsense. Every moment of your life is bound to occur again. Thus, live wholeheartedly, bring out the fullness of your potential, don't be a rough diamond but, through concentration and effort, polish yourself into a shining gem!
As you say, your mother and father make you, and thus we enter the world with specific potential. Of course there is the element of nurture, too, of upbringing, yet what we are naturally good at, or suitable for, is already largely laid out in this potential. It is different per person. One day we will all shine as unconscious stars in the firmament, yet through self-polishing we can shine in this life, too.
Your talking about "we are just warm bodies so try to have some fun before you die" brings up the image of a bunch of old farts sitting in a lukewarm cafeteria listening to a worn jukebox. Surely their existences could be more miserable, but they sure as hell aren't living their lives to the fullest. This mentality brings everything down to the lowest common defeatist denominator. "Let's just fuck and have an orgasm because that's the one enjoyable thing our life gave us." so we find ourselves in an MTV culture based on American sitcoms and corny romance novel lies. That's what I mean by gray mass. The memes of mediocrity overtaking society. Resulting in low quality public discourse, low quality expectations from life, low quality people to interact with.
I'm talking about quality of life, rather than the quantity approach you define as: "Mans purpose is reproduction”. Quality of life we find when engaging ourselves with art, science, literature, philosophy . . . Man is often ruled by inertia, and therefore we often don't bother to go through the pain and effort required to elevate ourselves. For instance, I could learn to play a complicated game that makes me intelligent and gives me pleasure and improves my self-esteem . . . But because you feel too tired to read the manual, because you are afraid to lose before you can get good, you sit down in the cafeteria and listen to the jukebox. Your nihilistic reasoning stops us from elevating ourselves. The voice in your head telling you that nothing you do matters because you will die anyway, and that even the statues your children erect to you will crumble. The deepest pains of grief, the heights of elevation when the events of our lives resound with our spirits, the peak we feel when we experience a stroke of genius . . . At the end of the day, we can say, when we live our lives to the fullest, that we lived through all of them, both pain and joy, and explored the vast richness that lies in the human faculties.