[Spenner]

It depends at which scale you are judging things. Too vast of a view of your actions or the collective actions that take place on earth, and no, they don't matter. But we're a system, a self perpetuating system that relies on everything within it to cooperate. Your actions matter in the sense that you can change things big or small with them. The end result of those actions could very well be a global change for the better, for example!!!

Things matter to me. I that it matters that we optimise things so that suffering can be avoided in areas big or small. Especially on the small. Little things like thoughts with a sour taste lead to massive amounts of suffering. It matters that we are helping each other enjoy the ride and to keep momentum somehow. Whether it's through posting and reflecting on things, or if you're actually out there doing things. THAT sort of thing might not matter-- how you do it-- but reciprocal altruism is a part of us at many scales.

Really to even begin to digest this question you need to break it up into something less broad and impossible to answer.

But I respect the existential impossibility of things mattering in scales the size of one universe or many. Although who's to say there's not a very important ripple effect we're amounting to, some many billions of years down the road. Don't think in terms of "when the universe ends, everything wouldn't have mattered"-- untrue. Things happened here, people lived, suffered, and went through many changes. These were things happening at the time, not at THAT time, when the universe has ended (if it does in many of the ways it could).

Also question your requirements for something to matter. In the present there are far more opportunities to realize that things can matter, unless you IMMEDIATELY toss it in the same boat with grandiose existentialism. Which is not a fair thing.

Maybe it's best not to worry so much if it matters in the grandest scheme of things. It's just not our territory. Don't let those anxieties intoxicate you.