Asklemmy

Idk if there is really a meaning. I think it's all kinda chaos. So much of life is out of our control, and I think meaning is something people assign to themselves to gain a sense of control.

Try to be grateful for whatever you have, embrace the things you enjoy doing and maximize your time with other people that get you. When you find yourself doing something that you enjoy doing try to really be present in moment. Think about how you're feeling and why you're feeling that way. Even the way your body physically feels in that moment.

If you want to find an easy meaning or purpose try to remember even little waves can travel pretty far. Try to be kind and patient with others when they make mistakes, leave things a little better than they were when you found them, that kind of thing.

At a macro level, it's the preservation of our species. On a micro level, it whatever makes you happy and doesn't hurt others (because that would conflict with macro).

Lots of interesting answers here. I figured I'll pitch in too.

IMHO there is no one true, universal meaning of life - just as there is no one meaning of any piece of art. I think the idea that everything around you must have a single meaning is a relatively modern one, which came from the requirements of efficient communication (which should indeed be precise and not open to interpretation).

As it stands, it is up to you to interpret the world around you and find different meanings for yourself, just as you should do with art. If you are struggling to start, consider those questions: What do you enjoy? What makes you happy? What do you think is "good", even if it makes you sad or uncomfortable? All those things are your personal interpretations of meaning of life. Or go ahead and make up something else, I'm not your dad.

I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?

As for this, I think when people realize the proximity of death and temporal nature of their life, they are much better at coming up with meanings. Maybe it is to see your partner or your children for a couple more years. Maybe it's another couple of gaming sessions with your pals. Whatever it is, when you realize you don't have much of it left, the importance of it typically rises dramatically from your perspective. If you're struggling to visualize something so dramatic, imagine that your favourite food will be completely banned and criminalized in your country in couple weeks. Wouldn't you want to enjoy it more before that happens?

There's no meaning to life, because that implies intent for it existing. It just does. However, I think it does give us an imperative to try to do good with the life we have. We're one of the few things in the universe that can experience pain and joy, and we should be trying to minimize the former and maximize the latter for the other beings capable of them.

Nothing happens if you do or don't, but it does make everything better for everyone if you do, which includes yourself for the purely self motivated out there. Life isn't a zero-sum game, so we should try to make it as nice as possible.

You are asking as a mind alienated from its body. Your body has interests that are not your interests, and it uses suffering to bend you to advance its interests for it. We all exist in a state of conflict with our own biological inheritance.

Our bodies generate a mind to suffer on its behalf, because without awareness it isn't really capable of suffering. That is the point of your existence as a mind. You exist to suffer on behalf of something that is not capable of suffering on its own, so that by your aversion to suffering, you will make choices that are in the interests of your body.

You have to decide whether to simply adopt the interests of your body, or whether to try to hold on to your own interests and make that the point of your life.

If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the "meaning" bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.

In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is "nothing matters so fuck it," that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.

I’ve always preferred Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. From that view, questions like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ don’t actually have an answer, because life itself lies outside language. It doesn’t need to be explained; it shows itself in the act of living. Trying to express it in words is already a kind of nonsense, because we’re asking language to do what only experience can. That’s why any attempt to describe it feels ‘mystical’ (not in a supernatural sense, but because it reveals something that cannot be captured by propositions). In this sense, the meaning of life is life itself; the ongoing activity of living.

I'm partial to the idea that we're part of a larger organism. So essentially similar to cell parts but on a different scale. There's something above that, but we are as likely to figure it out as cells are able to figure us out.

What to do with that? I have no idea. In lieu of objective facts, I guess it's useful to pick the good instructions from religions -- usually the ones that they all share are the ones that are worth adhering to. Do to others etc etc.

Life has no inherent meaning. It doesn’t need one. That doesn’t make it pointless either. These judgments are human constructs, not qualities of life itself.

But if someone needs a meaning in life:
The meaning of life is to give your life meaning.

Find it yourself. What feels important to you? What makes you unhappy? What makes you happy?

I tend to be on the empathetic side. I feel a lot of pain and desperation about the state of the world, and the way we humans treat one another so cruelly. That's why I am trying to find my own way to contribute, so that life, for us and those who follow, becomes permanently better.

Lots of good answers here. You might want to read up on Existentialism, a line of philosophy grappling with exactly this problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism

That's the beauty. Given that there is no goal, you are able to define your own.

Literally? There is no reason for life. Which scares people, so they develop superstition (theology) or ascribe it to emotions (happiness, suffering, etc). There is no reason, for life. The reason for life existing or how it came to be is certainly up for debate, but there is no why. We are alive, we are conscious. Eventually our bodies give out on us, and our life ends.

TBH, yeah, that's what I consider the point of my life - amusing myself until death. Whatever I do will not matter in 100, 1000 or 1000000 years which is all just a blip in the scale of the universe. So basically, I'm just trying to have fun and help other people have fun. Of course I realize that I'm incredibly privileged to live a life where I don't have to worry about too much and I can think about fun and not surviving. I experienced difficult periods in my life and the answer to this question was much, much harder back then.

I would argue we have a whole list of purposes:

• procreate
• copulate
• mate
• engage in sexual reproduction
• propagate the species
• reproduce
• conceive life
• bring forth offspring
• weave new generations
• kindle the spark of life
• sow the seeds of tomorrow
• whip up some womb-biscuits
• bake a bun in the baby oven
• start a stork-summoning ritual
• do the chromosome cha-cha
• know each other in the biblical sense
• lie together
• hook up
• get it on
• do the deed
• bump uglies
• initiate a genetic merge request
• fork the DNA repo
• compile the next generation
• instantiate another human

I think you got the gist.

And in the meantime also entertain ourselves, of course.

The answer is that there's no one answer. Since people find it, since people make it, and some people don't think it exists. I'm that last one, just killing time until sweet oblivion finally claims me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jHPOzQzk9Qo

Maybe the point is to find your own meaning of life.
Like my reason to continue may be different than yours (once found)

Happiness.

There's so much to explore. Not just physical locations, but our own minds and each other's too. Learning about the laws of the universe, history, and seeing what's to come. Even pain is a thing to be experienced that the dead don't get to.

Is all that meaningless? All of us contain our own universe within us. Sure, it would be nice to care about all the other people (if there are other people) and what impact I have on them. But if in the long run nothing I do matters to them, fuck it. I'm mainly concerned with what's going on in here.

Optimistic Nihilism baby. Basically, if nothing we do matters in the long run, then live each day to be happy while helping to make others around you as comfortable as you can while we all take the ride.

https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14

There is no point, no purpose, self replicating cells appeared and evolution led to where we are now.

you are the worst splinter cell agent i have ever seen OP

Being alive is the only time when you can influence something, and as such, when your actions mean something.

When you're dead, it's over. There could be an opportunity for you to make something better for others or for your own enjoyment - but now all chances are gone.

So, why letting go of this amazing ability?

To explore this existence.

Why live? What's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of life? I hope I don't have to explain that people have been asking this question since we first were able to form words and start thinking. You're going to get as many different opinions to answer this question as there are people to write a response. You could spend a lifetime studying philosophy and not find a definitive answer. And in the end you just have to decide for yourself which answer most speaks to you. Are you atheist, materialist, spiritual, philosophical? Take your pick.

Personally, I like Buddhist philosophy for these kinds of questions. And I suspect the Buddha would say that we are here because of craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of reality. We live because we want to exist, we want to have experiences and feel the things that are available to us as living beings. Whether it's food or sex or money or adventure or admiration or love we feel like getting the things we want will make us happy. The flip side of craving is aversion, where we feel like achieving separation from those things that are unpleasant will make us happy.

Volumes have been written about this and it's impossible to summarize well in a single post. But if it speaks to you there's a lot more to say about it.

Essentially I think you're right, we are amusing ourselves. The point is that we seem to be built to do that - we come with a nice set of compulsions that give us happy feelings when we do certain things, and if those feelings are an illusion so what? They feel real.

are we just amusing ourselves until death?

Yes. That's arguably neither a good nor bad thing; a life with a prescribed meaning or prescribed expectations would be scary in a different way.

There's been philosophers that got famous arguing it's actually great and we should be excited, even, but "your mileage may vary".

he idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?

There is a thing called quality-adjusted life years. To make decisions about certain things like transplants, and to measure the effectiveness of health policy, they absolutely will factor in how much time you'll get from treatment and how much it's worth living.

Nations like mine will also help you peace out gracefully.

Nothing lasts [...] are we just amusing ourselves until death?

It seems to me like you are of the opinion that the finiteness of life robs it of meaning. If so, why not contribute to longevity research? It's only been a couple decades since we learned how telomeres relate to senescence. If enough people work on the problem or donate to it, we very well might be able to crack immortality before you croak. At the very least, that will give you a few more centuries to figure out what the meaning of life is.

You might object that immortality would lead to great wealth inequality, and you'd rather live a finite life than an unfair life. You can only believe this if you believe that the finality of life does not ultimately make life worthless. In which case, why not contribute to the cause of socialism?

I read something recently that explained every moment was like a mini death (referring to how Change is the only constant) and as such everything we do is to understand and integrate death-like processes and to see them as one cohesive whole, if we extrapolate this pattern to the process of death as a human we begin to realize that our death is so much more likely to be some pattern like that where we must question if the life we had was ever so subjectively experienced to begin with, at that point we begin to realize that our death is not to be feared any more than we should fear taking off our clothes to change them when they are dirty.

In my view, we are here because the universe wants to understand itself.

I find solace in that.

I hope this helps your existential dread.

You have total free will. You can choose to follow or break the laws, you can go do drugs or be a hobo somewhere if that's the life you want to live.

Life is just your will to do something. And if you lose the freedom and will to do anything, you're, in my mind, already dead.

are we just amusing ourselves until death?

Yes, exactly that. There is nothing afterwards, and the fact that we're clinging to the surface of a rock flying through an infinite universe where we could be wiped out any second and never be able to do anything about it does rather make everything seem rather pointless.

And whilst you could be depressed about that, there's still a lot of pretty awesome things to do that amusing with. Nature is beautiful. The world and its geology is beautiful. Evolution is beautiful. Science is beautiful. Maths is beautiful (if you have the sort of mind that appreciates it). Learning about these things and experiencing them is beautiful. And so on. Even most people all over the world are pretty good most of the time, despite what some other people want you to believe.

And honestly, accepting there's no greater purpose is remarkably freeing. When something happens, it's just bad luck. It's not some greater power punishing you, it's not because you did something wrong (within reason - getting hit by a bus because you crossed the road without looking is really pushing the concept).

Hedonic threadmill: it's the hypothesis that we tend to a baseline level of happiness and on average, after some time, people who have won the lottery are as happy (or unhappy) as people who have gone bankrupt.

Look at us, we are apes, barely out of trees. We were fighting predators and cold and diseases that no longer exist. Just by being alive, we are the winners of millions of years of genetic lottery, evolution, fights, love and ingenuity.

We have access to most of human knowledge through devices that fit in our pockets, can visit other countries that were legendary to our forefathers, instead of hunting wild beasts we have satellites that guide us step by step to the nearest McDonald's.

Imagine time-traveling a few generations back, describing our life to our grand-grandparents, seeing their eyes grow wide. Now imagine, at the end, telling them how ennui got to us and we can no longer find meaning in our life.

I'm not spiritual, but I believe the universe as we know it was created by higher beings on a dimensional plane we can't comprehend. They created us as a resource. Perhaps for simulations, or science, or entertainment. I believe we are the worker ants for these beings and our collective meaning is to produce intelligence. Maybe we are an AI hive mind? Or fuck it maybe were just here to watch ufc and drink beer.

I like to recall some wise words of Christmas in these dark times:

Here’s the deal, newbie. You can stuff your stocking with shiny little toys from now until you grow some testicles, but until that stocking is filled with friendship, loyalty, love and devotion, well.. it’s just plumb empty.

And no, you can’t purchase those things at Laura Ashley. And no, you can’t win them in the red book giveaway extravaganza. And, gee, I’m sure if these aren’t things that you can wind up and watch spin for eight hours.

Let me make this exceptionally clear. Christmas is about love. You can’t live without other people’s love. Not during Christmas, not ever.

So go spend this time with your friends and family. And if they laugh at you, laugh with them. And if they laugh at you again, hit them and go find some new friends. But for the love of god, jesus, Mary, and Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat, don’t ever ever forget this, newbie. You have to give love to get love. So start giving. Now.

There's no point and the meaning you have to make yourself.

nihil novum sub sole

It has same meaning as summer breeze, or warm rays of sunshine. We make things to be more complicated than they really are. Enjoy experiences you are given, live thru pain, be a human. Existence is a weird, yup.

Life has the meaning you choose to give it.

You get to create your own meaning. It becomes challenging when your meaning isn’t the default societal milestones, in the western world it’s - college, promotion, marriage/kids, house, retirement, death. If that progress doesn’t resonate, then it means that you have to connect to yourself on a deeper level to figure out your purpose/your life theme.

My purpose is organizing my internal world for self alignment, I do it through self expression using art, language and diagrams. I live for self expression.