Our material existence is suffering, and humanity begins when we make inquiry into why we're stuck, athato brahma jijnasa. The promise is that there is no non-existence, despite our worries of death, or the common interpretations of death.
So if we pursue something without seeing it in the context of a grand or grander design, it was for naught, is how one could interpret that. Suffering, is the failure to fulfill some personal desire, but if there is a grand design, then we only exist within a causality flow and there's no real need for suffering at least cognitively speaking.
This may be the older way to question our value system. Human values are narrow and deviate from what is considered divine or simply (larger), eco-system level, and outside the confines of sol, we have galaxies, if there are conscious energies / interconnects, it balloons beyond comprehension. We are not disconnected, but as a being, to seek the greater in some way may be the takeaway.