'The Lovely Bones' & Heaven

I just finished the book 'The Lovely Bones'. At first, I wasn't interested in reading it because it sounded too depressing. A girl is killed and watches her family deal with her death, from heaven. It actually was better than I thought, because the story focused more on how the people around her dealt with her death. It could have turned into a detective story or a manhunt for the killer. But, within the story, her killer doesn't even matter, since it won't bring back the girl to punish him. It's more how her family fractures and then has to come together again, without her. The thing I didn't like was the concept of heaven. It works for the story, because we get some idea of what the girl is like, and can look into different character's thoughts.
But I have a problem with the general idea of heaven as a place where you keep your identity, and your family eventually joins you, with their own identities. Everything you want is available, and you spend eternity as yourself. It makes life seem pointless. If you get to spent eternity as yourself, with everyone you know, then what is the point of life? After you get to know some people you can be in heaven with, why keep living? Everything's better there and eventually everyone you know will join you. Also, if you are yourself for eternity, what would you do? If everything is instantly available, it makes desire pointless. If we were exactly the same in heaven, we would be driven insane, since we have eternity to spend doing nothing. The novelty of having anything would wear off after a while.
I really don't see how people trully believe in the idea of heaven as an actual place you spend as a normal conscious human. It makes more sense as a place where you merge and have no consciousness, and it's nothing like life. That makes life the most important thing, since there is nothing like it. I guess it's a lot more scary to think like that, and I can see why people would prefer to think of heaven as a place that's not much different from earth. I can't convince myself to believe that, so I just try not to think about it.