Comment by idiotsecant

It's not so absurd. The only afterlife that exists (in a materialist sense) is what other people think of you. The only part of 'you' still around us quite literally just a memory in someone's head. That's not nothing.

Whether we should care about that or not is a philosophical conversation, I suppose. I would take the side of if we care about what people think about us when we are alive, surely we should care what they think of us when we are dead. Otherwise, we only value their opinion of us as a function of what they will do for/to us, which seems not great.