what is the meaning of life?

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

The answer to the meaning of life is 42.

Answer 3

Knowledge that you existed and experienced things in human form and perhaps had a pleasurable moment and shared your existence with another and regenerated your species.= Care
To have knowledge of the above would mean you continue in some afterlife. = Hope. To have such a hope = Faith
To have faith = A Creator, for you have no control over your existence = Religion. To form a basis over your destiny, a formula to follow = Mankind, a species that thinks and asks questions as this one, or maybe the chance to feel and give Love, but we are not that ready to accept such a simple answer, are we..

Answer 4

Life is a learning ground both good and evil, what you choose determines not just who or what you are, we need to both sense good and evil to understand more so therefore you are put in situations you do not want to be in.

Life is purity sometimes to put right which is wrong your own moral judgement tells you that.
And in all life comes death only in the material sense spiritually you are reborn this is a part of life whatever existance you are in.

Answer 5

Meaning is a human invention, so you can invent what every meaning you want. There is no one meaning but there are many ways to be happy and enjoy life that work, so forget meaning, just try and live a happy life.

Answer 6

...there really is no meaning, however, since we put meaning to everything you could say that any answer put here could apply,so with that said, you could just ask your self the same question and come up with an answer that would be more fitting to your own reality of life.

the only real reason we even ask such a question is that we are all in search of a higher truth for our self.

No matter how we try to answer the old question of what is life there are not enough words to describe it and for many who attempt to find the answer will eventually find them self standing in a world of silence........

its really not complicated, we just make it so....................

for the most part life is what we make of it...................

"spirits having this human experience"

Answer 7

Why should it have a meaning in the first place? There's no evidence that suggests that everything must have a meaning! If i design a pen, does it have a meaning? NOPE. Does it have a use? YES, What is it? It is used to write with by the designer. As simple as that.

Answer 8

The meaning of life is death come next.

Answer 9

The answer to the Great Question of life, the universe, and everything... 42.

Answer 10

the meaning of life can be found in the dictionary. id like to know what is the purpose of life?

Answer 11

to gain as much wisdom and knowledge while on this plane of existence then teach the same wisdom and knowledge to others so what has been learned will not be lost. thus one can hopefully leave this plane of existence a little better than when they came into it.