Why does anything matter?

A human is nothing but a machine made of smaller components, running on chemical reactions.

There is no inherent meaning in any action which a person may partake in, for there is no inherent meaning in anything at all.

A person can create goals, an objective or aim with intrinsic value to the creator, but these goals are just tiny islands in a never-ending ocean. You can get closer to an arbitrary endpoint you set, get to another island further away from where you began, but you are still infinitely far away from the edge of the ocean, for it is infinitely large.

Why do people seem to care so much?

I suppose you could set pain as a variable, a measurement of how fulfilling one's life is, as you can't avoid pain and you are biologically programmed to dislike pain.

Even so, pain as a concept itself is just as infinitely arbitrary as every other aspect of everything else in existence. A life completely devoid of pain, whilst technically being the final goal, the end of the never-ending ocean, it is just as meaningless as a life of complete agony. Ultimately, you are stranded back in the middle of the infinite, never-ending ocean, having gone in a complete circle, nowhere closer to the end than you were in the beginning.

Even so, the majority of people are sufficiently distracted by pain to allow it to guide them towards an imaginary finish line.

But you cannot finish the race, nor can you reach the end of the never-ending ocean, for they are both infinite.

Thus, in regards to the ideal, you are and always will be, infinitely far away.

People used to ask me why I stopped trying. Why I stopped trying to reach the end of the ocean, to find the perfect life.

Well, it's not that I stopped trying,

it's just that I never tried in the first place.