what is the mean of life?

Answer 1

The question "what is the meaning of life?" means different things to different people. The vagueness of the query is inherent in the word "meaning", which opens the question to many interpretations, such as: "What is the origin of life?", "What is the nature of life (and of the universe in which we live)?", "What is the significance of life?", "What is valuable in life?", and "What is the purpose of, or in, (one's) life?". These questions have resulted in a wide range of competing answers and arguments, from scientific theories, to philosophical, theological, and spiritual explanations.

Popular beliefs

"What is the meaning of life?" is a question many people ask themselves at some point during their lives, most in the context "What is the purpose of life?" Here are some of the many potential answers to this perplexing question:

Survival and temporal success

* ...to accumulate wealth and increase social status
* ...to advance natural human evolution, or to contribute to the gene pool of the human race
* ...to advance technological evolution, or to actively develop the future human
* ...to compete or co-operate with others
* ...to destroy others who harm you, or to practice nonviolence and nonresistance
* ...to die having succeeded in your purpose
* ...to gain and exercise power
* ...to leave a legacy, such as a work of art or a book
* ...to live
* ...to produce offspring through sexual reproduction or asexual reproduction
* ...to protect one's family
* ...to pursue a dream, vision, or destiny
* ...to seek freedom, either physically, mentally or financially
* ...to seek happiness and flourish, experience pleasure or celebrate
* ...to survive, including the pursuit of immortality through scientific means (see life extension)

Wisdom and knowledge

* ...to be without question, or to keep asking questions
* ...to expand one's perception of the world
* ...to explore, to expand beyond our frontiers
* ...to learn from one's own and others' mistakes
* ...to seek truth, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom
* ...to try to discover and understand the meaning of life
* ...to understand creation

Ethical

* ...to achieve a supernatural connection within the natural context
* ...to achieve enlightenment and inner peace
* ...to achieve rebirth in the Pure Land
* ...to become like God, or God-like
* ...to be rewarded for your deeds
* ...to experience existence from an infinite number of perspectives in order to expand the consciousness of all there is (i.e. God)
* ...to express compassion
* ...to follow the "Golden Rule"
* ...to give and receive love
* ...to live in a way that you don't harm yourself and don't harm your environment
* ...to work for justice and freedom

Religious and spiritual

* ...to be a filter of creation between heaven and hell
* ...to die and become a martyr
* ...to live in peace with each other, and in harmony with our natural environment (see utopia)
* ...to produce useful structure in the universe over and above consumption (see net creativity)
* ...to protect humanity, or more generally the environment
* ...to reach Heaven in the afterlife
* ...to seek and acquire virtue, to live a virtuous life
* ...to serve others, or do good deeds
* ...to turn fear into joy at a constant rate achieving on literal and metaphorical levels: immortality, enlightenment and atonement
* ...to understand and follow the "Word of God"
* ...to worship, serve, or achieve union with God
* ...to disprove the existence of a or all all gods

Other

* ...to achieve self-actualisation
* ...to contribute to collective meaning ("we" or "us") without having individual meaning ("I" or "me")
* ...to find a purpose, a "reason" for living that hopefully raises the quality of one's experience of life, or even life in general
* ...to live, and enjoy the passage of time
* ...to have fun
* ...to participate in the inevitable increase in entropy of the universe
* ...to make the conformists' lives miserable (see non-conformism)
* ...to participate in the chain of events which has led from the creation of the universe until its possible end (either freely chosen or determined, this is a subject widely debated amongst philosophers)
* ...to relate, connect, or achieve unity with others
* ...to resolve all problems that one faces, or to ignore them and attempt to fully continue life without them, or to detach oneself from all problems faced (see Buddhism)
* ...to seek and find beauty
* ...as there is no intrinsic meaning to life, to each individual, the "meaning of life" is whatever he/she decides it is. In that sense, every point above is potentially valid.
* ...an answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is that it is just simply being able to ask the question, "What is the meaning of life?" (see Sri Sri Ravi Shankar below)
* ...a combination of any of the above.

No purpose, and therefore...

* ...to simply live until one dies (there is no universal or celestial purpose)
* ...just a series of events
* ...just nature taking its course
* ...the wheel of time keeps on turning
* ...the cycle of life
* ...whatever you see you see, as in "projection makes perception"
* ...there is no purpose or meaning whatsoever (see nihilism)
* ...who cares?

Answer 2

Hmmmm, I think you mean, The meaning of life...right? Basically, to live life to it's fullest without hurting anyone (to the extreme: abuse, for ex.), and learning and growing as an individual; it's different for everyone; I'm 50 and I've had a full, well traveled, unique life...but it's nowhere near over! I still need to Dog sled, swim with dolphins, go on an archaeological dig, make sure my son finds fulfillment and happiness...and when I'm, old and gray, have him take care of me in the home that our family has had for the last 45 years of my life to present...like I did with my father instead of putting him in a nursing home...

Answer 3

"Just remember that you're standing on a planet that evolving,
Revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second,
So it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.

The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself contains 100 billion stars,
It's 100,000 light years side to side,
It bulges in the middle, 16,000 light years thick,
But out by us it's just 3,000 light years wide.

We're 30,000 light years from galactic central point,
We go around every 200 million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions,
In this amazing and expanding universe..."

Eric Idle of Monty Python

Answer 4

The mean of life?

It is interesting how you put that. One could take is as a misspelling to refer to meaning, another could refer to the statistical mean of life and quote several means - the mean life span is 33.7 years, the mean number of children born by a woman is 1.783; or you could take is another way altogether. The mean of life is evil.... or in human form it is apathy...

What are you really askig?

Answer 5

life is like a test a really long test!

do right things be a good person there is no easy way out not even killing your self so you should try to live life to its fullest ma by when you die "not kill your self" you might learn the meaning of live! hope i helped if i didn't plz don't fell sad.

Answer 6

The meaning of life is what you give to it.
You create your own reality.
You personify the meaning of your life, as does everything you see symbolize what you are and what you believe.

Answer 7

it is different to each of us ~ it is what we learn and feel and what makes us who we are inside - it is what we see when we look at the world, what we crave in the mornings and miss when it is absent - what we dream about at night.. the meaning is what we live life to discover...

but if that is not what you meant then you may be looking for this:

What are Half Lives and Mean Lives?

Specifying the half life or mean life of a process is a way of quantifying how fast it is occurring, when the whole process would in principle take forever to complete. The example we will talk about here is radioactive growth and decay, but examples from other fields include the recovery of a muscle after some exertion, and the filling of a cistern.

In particular then, the half life of a radioactive element is the time required for half of it to decay (i.e. change into another element, called the "daughter" element).

So if a radioactive element has a half life of one hour, this means that half of it will decay in one hour. After another hour, half of the remaining material will decay. But why didn't all of that remaining material decay in that second hour? Does the element somehow know that it's decaying, and alter its decay speed to suit?

Textbooks are usually content with deriving of the law of decay, and don't tend to address this question. And yet it forms a classic example of the way in which research in physics (and science in general) is carried out. Regardless of how we might expect an element to behave--where perhaps the second half might be expected to decay in the same amount of time as the first half--this simply does not happen. We must search for a theory that predicts this.

Science is often thought to proceed by our logically deducing the laws that govern the world. But it's not that simple; there are limits to what we can deduce, especially about things in which we cannot directly participate. Radioactive decay is a good example of this. We can't use a microscope to watch the events that make an element decay. The process is quite mysterious. But what we can do is make a simple theory of how decay might work, and then use that theory to make a prediction of what measurements we can expect. That's the way science proceeds: by making theories that lead to predictions. Sometimes these predictions turn out to be wrong. That's fine: it means we must tinker with the theory, perhaps discard it outright, or maybe realise that it's completely okay under certain limited circumstances. The hallmark of a good scientific theory is not what it seems to explain, but rather what it predicts. After all, a theory that says the universe just appeared yesterday, complete with life on earth, fossils and so on, in a sense "explains" everything beautifully by simply defining it to be so; but it predicts absolutely nothing. So from a scientific point of view it is not a very useful theory, because it contains nothing that allows its truth to be tested. On the other hand, while it's arguable that the theory of quantum mechanics explains anything at all, it certainly does predict a huge number of different phenomena that have been observed; and that's what makes it a very useful theory.

For radioactive decay, our theory is that the atoms decay, or change into another atom, quite spontaneously. At a basic level, we don't know why this should be; but we can only proceed step by step, and so first we begin with this simple theory. We postulate that they decay independently of whether their neighbours are decaying, and also that their tendency to decay is independent of how old they are. A given atom might decay after one microsecond, or one million years. However long it has been sitting intact makes no difference to its ability to decay right now. If the mechanism behind its decay is strong, in the sense that the atom has a large chance of decaying, then it won't last long: after all, the chance that it won't decay in some time interval is small, so the chance that it survives for any appreciable amount of time is then also small. That can be worked out by simple probability: multiplying together the probabilities that it doesn't decay for a string of those time intervals. The statistics of decaying elements, such as the mean and standard deviation of the number of atoms decaying in various time intervals, were measured soon after radioactivity was discovered; they were found to match those predicted by this idea of random decay, called Poisson statistics. Whenever anything has a small chance of happening, but there are lots of opportunities for it to happen, we get Poisson statistics.

So certainly physics has not proven, and can never prove, that its theory of atomic decay is true. The logical process is that if atoms decay randomly, then Poisson statistics will result. Experiments show that Poisson statistics do indeed result, but logically this does not mean that atoms decay randomly. Nevertheless, the way of science is that we do postulate that atoms decay randomly, until a further experiment calls this into question. But no experiment ever has. If this sounds like a reverse use of logic, then consider the same ideas for mechanics. Ideas of gravity, mass and acceleration were originally produced by Newton through the same process: because they predicted planetary orbital periods that could be verified experimentally. Because of this great success, expressions such as F = ma and F = GMm/r2 came to be canonical in physics. The logic was indeed being used in reverse; but no one was surprised when, three centuries later, one of the moon astronauts dropped a feather and a hammer together in the moon's vacuum, and found that they both fell at the same rate (although it was still beautiful and dramatic to watch!). That reverse logic had, after all, allowed him to get to the moon in the first place. So this way of conducting science works very well.

Answer 8

if we knew what the meaning of life was, it would take away the meaning in life...

Answer 9

42

Answer 10

the meaning of life depends on you and what you make of your life

Answer 11

In the USA?

I would think around 78 years for women and 73 years for men.