Disagree with this. From experience, which I’ll tell you more about, as maybe you can help your clients to move through the grief…
OP, the point in life is fun - the only reason for living is to please yourself and you make your own point.
I’ve been to the depths of suicidal thoughts and feelings of pointlessness after my DH died by suicide. This was after my mum being an aggressive, abusive, religiously obsessed, authoritarian parent (she used to hit me with a stick and I was a real parentified child, a pseudo-spouse to her all my childhood). My dad left when I was little - he’s never shown any interest in me other than dutiful 5 min phone calls from my teenage years to present day which make me feel like shit - like he’s dangling a carrot of attention that I can never get a bite of. My only sibling doesn’t speak to me because he believes that with me being 3yrs older than him I should have rescued us from our mum - he doesn’t get that I was a child too.
My point is that I got to a position in life where everyone left me and nobody had ever really cared about me in the first place. No one shone any little light of attention on me and what I was feeling, and it made me feel like life was pointless and that I was worthless. Until I met a counsellor who started doing that for me, and I started to feel better in myself, and realised that what I’d been missing all along was attention - space to let myself speak, attention, care, someone to listen to me and how I was doing, my needs, wants, desires. We all need that. Being with people in family or activity groups or whatever unfortunately doesn’t necessarily give you attention (your needs, wants, desires), unless you brave sharing a little bit of yourself and you meet a particularly kind and attentive soul.
It sounds like you (same as I did) might have fallen into giving that to everyone around you but not getting it in return from anyone? I think lots of people experience a lack of attention stemming from childhood, because we’re not very good as humans at giving each other true attention and presence. A lot of us go through life experiences that put us in a position of suddenly being alone. Sometimes it’s extreme experiences, sometimes it’s small movements in life that just happen. And it doesn’t help that as a society we vilify and shame people for needing attention! Maybe in a perfect world we’d all get enough during childhood to help us learn to value ourselves by the time we get to adulthood, but that often isn’t the case.
There are times in life when everyone leaves or no one cares, and that’s sad, lonely, annoying to the depths of you, and it would fill anyone with despair. You should absolutely feel all of these things. It makes total sense why you would. We’re a pack species and thrive in connection, so of course you feel terrible if you don’t have it.
The difficult thing is when you’re in that place, you have to be the first one to listen to yourself and make space for how you’re feeling. Because like a PP said, connection comes from vulnerability -
Are you opening up to them. Admitting you feel awful. It's the only way to get to real friendship.
You have to share the real you with people to get real connection. When you get real connection (from within yourself or from another person), it’s like an electrical circuit in your body is connected again and the lights turn back on.
So I’d begin with connecting to yourself. Write in a journal or go out on a walk and have a rant to yourself. Get acquainted with what you need, want, desire. Let yourself feel the grief you’re feeling and allow it to be okay. It is okay to feel it all. Let yourself acknowledge how you’d prefer to feel. And then see what one little tiny thing you can do to listen to yourself and share something of yourself with someone else or find something you can do to feel a little bit of how you’d prefer to feel. It’s hard to claw things back into a connected place, but you can do it. Your alternative is getting stuck in the grief of it all. Maybe right now you need to be in the grief for a while, because that’s how feelings work - you’ve got to feel it to heal it. When you feel it all without questioning, denying, disowning your feelings, the feelings do naturally pass.
When you connect with people and brave sharing the real you, some people are terrible at responding - ranging from the mildly dismissive, to those who are afraid of feelings themselves, to those who don’t know how to work through grief, and those who are downright abusive or shaming. (Including yourself - it’s easy to be all of those things towards our own feelings too and for them to come out at tangents). Don’t be put off. Learn what makes you feel good and what doesn’t, both within yourself and with others. There are people out there who are capable of connecting with the real you, and you have the capacity inside yourself too. Sometimes people will get it wrong, but look for the people who get it right most of the time. Keep trying and weeding until you find some good ones.