There’s a saying that every time an old person dies, it’s like a library burning down. All that knowledge is lost.
It’s easy to imagine a 70-year-old thinking, “What’s the point of learning something new? I’ll be gone before too long, and it will all be for nothing.”
In one sense, this is like Woody Allen’s concern that the sun will eventually destroy the Earth. “What’s the point of it all?” he wonders. But he could just as well ask what is the relevance to him, right now, of what happens millions of years in the future.
So one answer to the question “why learn things now, if I’m just going to die and it will all evaporate,” is that you’ll enjoy it now.
In that sense, “Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die” takes a narrow view of what’s fun to do right now.
Here’s another way to look at the question.
Some people say that the history of the universe is “God getting to know himself.” The idea is that all consciousness is somehow connected to a bigger scheme. I used to find the idea rather silly, but there’s something to it.
You could ask, for example, how God knows what it’s like to be this or that, and one answer (which I am not advocating) is that the very definition of God is that He’s the sum total of all experience. IOW, every conscious experience of every conscious thing is somehow part of the mind of God.
Stated that way, it sounds New Age-ish and a little ridiculous, but it’s actually embedded in the debates over God’s foreknowledge.
One question that Reformed theologians used to ask was “When did God know that man would fall?” — i.e., before or after he decided to create the world. IOW, did he decide to create the world, and then foresaw that man would fall, or did he consider creating the world, saw that man would fall, and then decided to create it anyway?
I think the question is a little silly because we’re imposing an “in time” perspective on a being who exists outside of time. Still, it reminds me of the “God getting to know himself” perspective.
Imagine the state of things before creation. All of existence is simply the Trinity living in a state of perfect love. In that reality, does it make any sense at all to ask “what does it feel like to be a 9-year-old girl, starving to death in Ethiopia?”
There are no girls, there is no time, there is no starvation, and there is no Ethiopia. The question makes no sense until the concept of creation is broached.
Once again, the question imposes a time-bound perspective on a being that is not bound by time, but I hope you’re starting to see the point. God’s perfect knowledge of every detail of creation only makes sense once He decides to create, or at least considers the idea of creating. In that way, every detail of creation is, in a sense, “God getting to know himself.” Or at least “God becoming omniscient with reference to the creation.”
Perhaps you could reduce it all down to this infra-lapsarian perspective. “God only knows what I’m experiencing right now because I’m experiencing it.” Which is not that far removed from the New Agey “the universe is God getting to know himself.”