"Life sucks and then you die" feels like the motto of life to me right now
There's something to that. [more below]
for all I know, they could be right (does this make me an agnostic instead?).
There doesn't have to be an 'instead.'
Lately life feels empty...there isn't much to my life.
And here we come to my point from 'above.' Often, we have an intrinsic software-pattern that causes this — some call it the 'hedonic treadmill' or 'hedonic adaptation.' I also recommend Sonya Lyubomirsky's research into the hedonic treadmill. In essence: you won't find satisfaction in a 'view' or a job or a person or an event, because we're not built for that. You can sidestep that problem through meditation, or you can rearrange your hobbies and daily-tasks so that they create more and more 'flow-psychology' states and aren't dependent on the nature of what is pursued as much as how they are pursued.
I'm almost starting to envy religious people
There's a lot to religious life that unfortunately isn't available to most secularists — specifically, communities that combine ethical reflection, community, meditation, and some sort of accountability to our highest needs:
Make yourself accountable
Mindfulness can be powerful in dealing with urges, but sometimes it’s not enough for long-term behavior change...
They key principle here is to ally with something outside ourselves — perhaps a friend, therapist, sponsor, or Twelve Step group. Here we find people to give us manageable assignments for behavior change and hold us accountable for getting them done.
For religious folk, they have it all in one, like a sushi roll of meditation/prayer, community, and accountability of one kind or another (whether it's from a guru, teacher, priest, or co-religionists, and so on). That can easily go bad and turn into pressure, but there is a helpful version of social-feedback to be found there.
my old boss is part of a religion I think of as flat-out bizarre, however she was a very kind and wise person
Well, it's hard to know what you mean. 'Wise' usually requires some sort of objectivity and correctness. Perhaps you mean calm or steady, non-reactive? Many religionists I know can be really kind, calm, un-worried abou the future and past...and yet totally make unwarranted claims about the structure of the cosmos if you scratch the surface. So, I see why 'wise' is often reserved for the minds that are calm AND objective/accurate.
I decided that I might as well still believe in an afterlife.
I will assume you are being a little casual, here? Because a belief means to feel something is actually true because you are convinced, not in hoping something is true because it's pleasant, or avoiding research that might reveal conclusions are unpleasant:
Beliefs are not like clothing: comfort, utility, and attractiveness cannot be one’s conscious criteria for acquiring them. It is true that people often believe things for bad reasons—self-deception, wishful thinking, and a wide variety of other cognitive biases really do cloud our thinking—but bad reasons only tend to work when they are unrecognized. Pascal’s wager suggests that a rational person can knowingly believe a proposition purely out of concern for his future gratification. I suspect no one ever acquires his religious beliefs in this way (Pascal certainly didn’t). But even if some people do, who could be so foolish as to think that such beliefs are likely to be true?