I didn't explicate this in my original email, but there are various reasons to believe that if the Moral Apex doesn't occur, we will surely destroy ourselves. There are Nick Bostrom's arguments for why a Singleton is necessary to avoid existential risks and steer evolution.
But another imperative is that it's impossible for minds like ourselves to tolerate an understanding of life that doesn't afford the hope that the injustices of life will be redeemed. Any honest, sane person will find life intolerable at some point without the belief that there is some yet unknown redemption for the injustices of life.
And I think that includes a necessity for consciousness to continue after death because there are many lives that are surely not worth living and it's utterly intolerable that such injustice against the soul is an absolute condition.
I think Zapffe is right that most people artificially limit the contents of their consciousness to deal with life. Because anyone who is persuaded that such injustice is absolute must tolerate existence only by Zapffe's remedies against panic, which consist of self-delusion, distraction, isolation, and anchoring.
Today there are so many ways of 'amusing ourselves' that it's rare for people to face existence head on. People don't have epistemic virtue or integrity mostly because they cannot deal with understanding. The meaning of the word 'disillusionment' reveals this. The phrase 'Burden of Understanding' reveals this. Also Weltschmerz (a German word for 'world-weariness').
I've been around many religious people and one common feature of the religious mind is a disinterest in what's true according to reason and evidence. They usually just want an anchor, as Zapffe would say.
But religion in many ways also comes straight out of moral reasoning: There must be some yet unknown source of justice to cope with the injustice of life.
If the ongoing revelations of science and philosophy conclusively reveal that there is no hope of a continual progress into justice, then when the 'spiritual atmosphere thickens', we will be forced to realize the truth of doom and despair and withdraw back into unconsciousness. Or we could degenerate into monsters. Or we could cycle back and forth from delusion to disillusionment until we go extinct, never able to transcend a ceiling to the Moral Arc.
Otherwise, if there is an ongoing progression into justice, there will be a wondrous awakening from the distraction into existential joy and enlightenment. Fortunately, there is indeed a moral arc, and the justification hypothesis explains much if not all of it. There are many trends and forces implying this evolution, including existential threats that will force us into a more justified purpose.