I take your point, I can see what you're driving at, but I don't agree with you.
It's not about the value of the day, sure the moments that pass are special, but if at the end of our lives we become nothing, if nothing is retained of me or you, then that's a sum total of nothing. No purpose, no point, just a very complex organism decomposing into constituent parts.
Now I'm okay with that, but I have never lived believing that.
And as for the great ones you mention and you and I, our mortality still drives us regardless of an afterlife or not. We have a physical life to build and accumulate positive attributes of the self.
