The Despairing Man

I read through Ecclesiastes a week or so ago, and am going through it for a Bible Study, and the despair of Solomon leave me with many questions. His soul sought satisfaction in wisdom, in the sensual, in fortune, and found everything apart from the Lord as "meaningless, a chasing after the wind." If a man who knew God came to find life grievous, what does the atheist do? What defines his life and gives him direction?
I find God so necessary, that I'm finding it difficult right now to understand the atheist view. Without God, there is no culmination. Life leads no where, there is no ultimate goal, or at least one that is unforseeable and so far in some distant future that one will lose himself in it.
And who does the godless thank for the good things in life? Who receives credit for the sun set? For the rustling of the wind between tree leaves? What is love? We cannot be awe-inspired without the Lord. One could argue that chance/evolution should be credited with these things, and we should just appreciate these objects in and of themselves and not seek a higher being. But if we are all truly offspring of an evolutionary process, then we would have no such thing as aesthetics. We would define things as good or bad depending on their immediate usefulness. And a sunset is not useful. The mountain range is not useful. The crashing waves are not useful.
We must all worship something or thank something for the beautiful wonders we find in this life. If not God, what?