Yeah, I could definitely see Atheism being a factor. I went from Episcopalian as a kid to Agnostic at age 13 to Spiritual in my 20s to full on Atheist in December and I'm the most depressed, anxious, unenthused, and confused I've been my entire life.
I was born in '91 and while the transition of technology was fast and things changed a lot from then to now, I'm actually quite nervous for the future...
The mental mechanism is really thimple.
Religious beliefs are not reasonable, but sensible.
If you think - like a Muslim - "life has ups and downs and at the end I die, but hey, then I go to paradise" then that is bearable.
All's well that ends well. But if you think, like a Westerner, "life has ups and downs, I have the delicious right to be an entitled snowflake, and at the end I die, and it was all for nuzzins," then you might as well kill yourself right away.
The only thing to stop you in that case (you can deduce that easily from following this forum for while)
is humans' innate cowardice. All very understandable and predictable. But is its even interesting ? More and more bots are failing...
I don't know what you mean by "the future."
Your personal future, the future of our culture, the future of this species of scavenging social apes, or the future of the planetary ecosphere, its evolution ?
That makes a big difference...
For your personal wellbeing, you must be in tune with one of these things, or possess the powers of delusion in a high enough concentration to simply believe in paradise/afterlife. If you look at it, it's simply an identity crisis, a crisis of meaning.
Humans are just smart enough to desire a meaning.
On the other hand, it's a bit ridiculous to expect a species with an average (global) IQ of 86, to come up with a "meaning" for the existence of the universe, that is plausible for a species of social apes with an average IQ of 86. Not gonna happen ;)
The problem is one inherent to this development stage of biological brains, we could call it a flaw - I'm convinced it is one - so humans came up with religion, to survive it. And our logical age debunked religion - this may turn out to have been a failed experiment, even if religion is just a band-aid.
This makes me think that biological brains have natural limits and may not be able to evolve past this point.