What else is life but a short stint of suffering between two non-existencies?

 You’ve brought together a few major philosophical systems—Buddhism, Epicureanism, nihilism—and tried to align them under a shared intuition about impermanence and suffering. There’s a lot here that’s internally consistent, but also a few places where concepts are being quietly collapsed that don’t actually mean the same thing.

Let’s separate the threads carefully.

1. Impermanence and physics (Second Law of Thermodynamics)

It’s tempting to equate the Buddhist idea of impermanence with entropy, and there is a family resemblance: both reject permanence and emphasize change.

But they are not the same claim:

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a physical statement about entropy in closed systems.
• The Buddhist concept of impermanence (anicca) is a phenomenological and existential claim: everything conditioned is unstable and not fit for attachment.

One is a statistical law about energy states. The other is a claim about experience and suffering. They overlap poetically, but they are not logically equivalent.

2. Buddhism vs Epicureanism

There is real overlap with Epicureanism:

Shared points:

• Reduction of unnecessary desire
• Emphasis on minimizing suffering
• Critique of craving and fear

But the divergence is important:

• Epicureanism aims at pleasure understood as absence of pain (ataraxia) within a materialist framework.
• Buddhism (especially early Theravāda) aims at cessation of craving through insight into non-self, not just moderation of desire.

So Epicurus says: “simplify desire to reduce disturbance.”
Buddha says: “see through the mechanism that generates craving in the first place.”

They converge in practice (less craving → less suffering), but diverge in diagnosis of what a “self” is and what liberation means.

3. Reincarnation as “unscientific assumption”

You’re correct in a narrow empirical sense: rebirth is not currently falsifiable in the way physical theories are.

However, within Buddhist traditions, rebirth is not always framed as a literal “soul transferring bodies.” In many interpretations (especially philosophical Buddhism), it is:

• a continuity of causal processes (karma as conditioning)
• not necessarily a metaphysical self migrating

So when rejecting reincarnation, you are rejecting a metaphysical interpretation, not necessarily the entire ethical-psychological framework.

4. Nihilism and “life as suffering between non-existences”

This is where a key philosophical distinction matters.

What you’re describing aligns more closely with existential pessimism than strict nihilism.

• Nihilism (strict sense): no objective meaning, value, or moral structure exists at all.
• The claim “life is suffering between non-existences” still contains:
• a structured narrative of suffering
• implicit valuation (suffering as central)
• a metaphysical framing of “non-existence” before and after

That’s not “nothing matters.” It’s more like “the dominant feature of experience is suffering and it ends.”

Buddhism actually does not land in nihilism either. It explicitly rejects both:

• eternalism (something permanent exists)
• nihilism (nothing has causal or ethical continuity)

This is why traditions like Madhyamaka explicitly warn against sliding into “nothing matters” conclusions.

5. Where the core disagreement really sits

Your position seems to rest on three assumptions:

1. Consciousness is an accident of biological systems
2. Desire is the primary generator of suffering
3. Ending existence or desire is the logical endpoint of analysis

Buddhist frameworks would accept (2), partially accept (1 depending on school), but strongly reject (3) as the conclusion—because they distinguish:

• cessation of craving
  from
• annihilation of experience or value

Epicureanism also rejects (3): it does not advocate non-existence, only bounded desire and stable pleasure within existence.

6. A subtle tension in your conclusion

This line is the pivot:

“What else is life but a short stint of suffering…”

That is a metaphysical compression of experience into a single dominant attribute. It’s coherent as a personal interpretation, but it is not a logically necessary conclusion of impermanence, physics, Buddhism, or Epicureanism.

All four traditions you invoked actually agree on something more precise than that:

• experience is unstable
• attachment generates distress
• reducing craving reduces suffering

They diverge sharply on whether that leads to:

• resignation (pessimism),
• tranquility (Epicureanism),
• awakening (Buddhism),
• or meaninglessness (nihilism)

If you want, I can  map Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and modern physicalism side-by-side in a clean comparison table so the overlaps and irreducible differences become very clear.