life is for whatever you want it to be, if you follow freudian philosophy, life is to get as much pleasure as posible, if you follow nietzche, life is to get as highest as you can in the social structure.
as for the afterlife, i cant tell, i haven't being dead. i'm atheist, but i do believe the conscience live on, why? i'll give you hawking as an example, hawking use to say data(anything) that goes through a black hole simply dissapears, but that then he realized that that breaks physics and rectified his theory. data(ideas, thought, emotion) is/are electrical impulses and chemicals, they cannot dissapear, whether our conscience returns to the planet(FFVII WTF!!!) or emlds with the consciones of the planet(if it has one) its something i cant found out.