What is the meaning of life?

Question

I know it is a clichéd question, but felt like asking it anyway.

Answer 1

"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

I know this is a clichéd answer but I felt like making it anyway.

Life is what you make it.
Life is not a bed of roses.
Life means never having to say 'I'm dead'.
Life is a b i t c h.
Life is a beach.
Life is as meaningless as the question 'What is the meaning of Life?'
Life is what you do before you die.
Life is what you don't do, that everybody else has such fun with.
'A' Life is what other people are very quick to tell you to get, especially if they don't have one themselves.
Life is the interface between two different phases of non-existence.
Life is a computer simulation by the mathematician John Horton Conway.
Life is what you see under a microscope but not through a telescope.
Life is a four-letter word.

Any help?

Answer 3

There is no meaning of life, it simply exists on many different levels. The reason humans wonder about it is because they can, due to a more complex, yet organized brain, compared to many other life forms. Here is the next question for your consderation. Are humans, compared to all other life forms which may exist in this or other universes, the ulitimate or an inferior form of life? I believe our development has not yet scratched the surface of our capacity, our brains have much greater capacity than we realize.

Answer 4

Life. Don't talk to me about life. Brain the size of a planet... open the door Marvin..

Ok a number of people have answered 42, but's what the question to the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Answer 5

No apologies required to ask such a basic & fundamental question about life itself, any number of times.
You are doing a great service, to those who are really keen about life, a look at this question would make them turn inwards , this time with YOUR kind help, incase they get too stuck with situation around !
Life is an opportunity to experience simultaneously , the different levels of perception... perception at sense organs level, with its unlimited source of knowledge, and the deeper perception levels where we also reach to the origin of such diverse manifestation of things we so perceive through sense organs !

Answer 6

42. Reference Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy

Answer 7

"What is the meaning of life?" is probably the most-asked philosophical question by humanity at large, though we will probably never find the answer, for whatever reason. Common answers include: happiness or flourishing; love; compassion; pleasure; reproduction; power; 42; knowledge, understanding, or wisdom; and being blessed, or achieving union with God or the divine; or simply that there is no meaning to life. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_of_life

Answer 8

The meaning of life is to be constantly searching. The purpose of this question, unanswerable as it is, is to keep up constantly striving for more. Once complacency sets in, life stops. Life is about new things. This is not to say that life should just be about exciting things. This question probably won't ever be resolved - but that is not to say you should stop searching.

Answer 9

I never liked this question, I dont think there is any meaning to life. Life is what we make of it - shouldnt the real question be - what is the purpose of life? I think the answer might be something less sinister than what we are hoping for - could it be that the single purpose of life is reproduction?

Answer 10

Ah grasshopper, does the snake see the top of the grass or does it spend it's life winding through the turbulence always searching? The other possibility would be finding the perfect single malt scotch.

Answer 11

If life means to live, to be fully alive, then we should go out and live to the fullest extent. If life is what you make it, then what are you doing with it? To me life is giving all the glory to God, and I'm not really doing a good job with that, I'm very selfish. Life is like water, right? Just go with the flow. I say good day.