I guess her biggest complaint is that life is boring. Everything we do is boring. I hear this every single day. She has big problems with time going too fast. She is always complaining that an activity was too short. Every evening she starts to get twitchy about the impending night. Every night she laments about how the day is already over.
I'd ask her what she'd be interested in, and then let her get her fill of it, including staying up late at night to work on it. This isn't good for the sleep schedule, but might help to fill her seeming void in the short term.
She used to be heavily into wishing for things. But, in the past few months she says she doesn't care. For a few weeks she was making wishes that she was dead. This was very unsettling and seemingly out of the blue. I caught her whispering to God saying, "dear God, I wish I was dead," multiple times. Now, she has said that she has no wishes which actually seems even more hopeless. "I don't wish to live. I don't wish to die. I don't wish anything." And, many variances of that. "I don't care about living. I don't care about dying. I don't care if you die or live." etc.
These sorts of statements are troubling. Yes, four year olds can be depressed; if I recall correctly, young highly gifted children can even engage in self-harm or suicide in serious cases. She also might be an easy target for abuse with those feelings. (I don't want to raise this specter unnecessarily, but such feelings might also be prompted by abuse.)
She has also told me out of the blue that she does not believe in God. She asked why she should believe in something she has not seen. She asked if she should believe in monsters she has not seen. She asked why God does not give her what she asks for.
Those questions all seem very common-sensical to me.
I wouldn't worry about them specifically, even if the part of you that is somewhat religious worries that she won't be able to partake in the benefits of religion later. Many (or at least a decent small fraction of) skeptics, agnostics and atheists come to have religious leanings at some point. Also, if her rationality excludes the possibility of religion, that might just be the way she is. Hard-core atheism finds its highest proportion of adherents among very highly educated, intelligent people, such as members of the National Academy of Sciences.
I personally don't think atheists go to hell-- either God does not exist, or she shows understandable mercy to those who can't bring themselves to believe, with so many different religious and non-religious cosmologies to choose from.She is very concerned about lying. She thinks I lie to her all the time. She has told me that whenever I say "one minute" it is always a different amount of time and therefore I am lying. She is also constantly wanting to know if I lied to my mom when I was little and why lying is so bad.
That sounds like normal nitpicky, lawyerly HG+ kid stuff.
I am a pragmatist and she is wearing me out. I do not really care to explain the meaning of life. I want her to believe whatever she needs to be happy and whatever she needs to get as much out of life as she can. I keep telling her that you get out of life what you put into it. How do I make that sentiment understandable to a four-year-old who thinks like I described above?
This might sound like a lot of work, but you could undertake a study of world religions and/or philosophy with her. You could also buy her some decent beginning philosophy books-- there are some written for children, some written with an encyclopedic overview, and some written as short biographical studies of famous philosophers. Maybe that or similar materials would interest her and answer some questions-- not about what life means, but about the types of questions others have asked along the way on the topic, so she wouldn't feel so alone in her journey.
