what is the meaning of life?

Answer 1

Life has any meaning you give it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Answer 2

Life actually does have an intrinsic meaning, but to get to it we're going to have to progress a little sideways. So bear with me...

Before we can talk about the meaning of life, I think it's productive to first ask the question, "What IS life?". This is a bit easier to answer, if not perfectly clear, because biologists obviously have to be able to explain what, exactly, the bio- part of their name refers to.

Biologists themselves often approach the question backwards. Instead of defining life as a whole, they instead consider the number of things that we generally consider to be 'alive' and figure out what qualities they all seem to have in common. This gives us a handful of properties that all living things we know of seem to have, including growth, reproduction, and the ability to make long-term adaptations to the environment.

Okay. So what does that MEAN? Again I think we need to break down our question with another one: "What IS meaning?" I'll take the same approach as the biologists on this one and consider examples. If a boulder fell on someone's house, and one observer asked another, "What does that mean?", what would acceptable answers be? I can think of a number of them ("It means that was a bad place to build a house"), and what they seem to have in common are that they describe greater implications and intent. Or in other words, given the event, process, or object, what will happen in the future, what led to it in the past, and what effects and intents does it have in the present?

So what does life do? It changes things. We know from the definition of life that it grows, consumes, spreads, alters its environment and alters the ways in which it does all these things. Having living things around means things are going to be different later, and probably were different before. Any time we imagine a place where nothing is ever different the only way that image works is to make it completely devoid of life. So that is something.

But it's not everything. Life doesn't produce just ANY change, but a certain flavour of it. Simply put, living things want to live. The changes living things make, generally speaking, either help them do so or kill them off. So life is not just about change, but change ideally for the better, even if practically it falls short sometimes.

This, then, must be the meaning of life. To change for the better.

Curiously enough, a quick survey of major philosophies, religions, and systems reveals that almost all of them seem to integrate this concept. Change for the better. There may be other important things, as some of the above systems would suggest, but to 'change for the better' is, at least, is the one thing implied by the very nature of the way things are. So do it!

Answer 3

That's exactly the question I've been pondering over all my life. Some say to search for the meaning of life is the meaning.
Some lowly minds say things like having a family was the meaning, but that doesn't lead anywhere since the offspring would only be confronted with the same question. Some say to be happy is the meaning but I disagree, striving for happiness can make your life more bearable but cannot be a meaning in itself.
The worst answer would doubtlessly be that of some religious people who give up all chances for happiness or for finding the meaning in favor of being slaves to their (most likely imaginary) god. They wouldn't use the word slavery but they'd say to serve god was the meaning, in truth they choose to be slaves to a dictator that probably exists only in their minds.

So I think for now, the search for the meaning is the closest we can get to the meaning yet. Keeping a free and open mind, being wary of concepts designed to truncate your spiritual growth (like christianity!), and following your heart and intuition is the best advice I can give - after all, I'm just a searcher for the truth, too.

Answer 4

80% of humanity, the religious folks, don't need to ask the meaning of life, the church tells them....the supernatural explanation. But the rest of us can't swallow religious dogma, because there's no evidence. Nobody can prove that there life after death, that people are tortured or rewarded after life or that there's invisible spirits running around.

I've come to two conclusions recently:

1. Life has no meaning
2. Life has a million meanings.

First, there's a certainty that death and annihilation awaits not only you, but the Earth in general. It's an astonomical certainty that our sun will supernova and leave the earth a burnt crisp, not to mention all the other extinction level events around the corner.

Second, the million things that give us meaning are the pleasurable experiences we can conjure up during the short period we are here on the earth, in the form of the relationships we have with our kids and other people, and the 'housekeeping' types of purposes. What i mean by that are the curing disease, ending hunger, improving literacy, reducing crime, preventing war, helping other kinds of things.

So the bottom line is, we only have a temporary meaning to life, to reduce pain and increase pleasure, other than that everything is lost to oblivion.


To be or not to be? "To be" is temporary and "not to be" is inevitable.....

Answer 5

The Meaning of Life is a movie by Monty Python. It was made in 1983 and happened to be the last movie that they did. It showed various skits throughout the various stages of life. According to the movie, the meaning of life is nothing special, it is

"Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations."

Answer 6

i used to ponder this question day and night and sometimes my mind wanders back to it, but for now i have decided that perhaps you dont go looking for the meaning of life, perhaps you never find it, but instead you create it. so every life has a different meaning. and every life has a different impact on the world. and no life really goes unnoticed and the world keeps spinning and the sun keeps rising and people don't spend their lives searching for something that cant be found. because what you think you'll find, you're actually creating.

Answer 7

The meaning of life as a whole is to create love. What is the individual meaning of your life? That is something you must find out for your self.

Hint: In what way would you most enjoy creating love?

Answer 8

To love and be loved in return. If you can achieve this, then life will have meaning and you will not have lived in vain. Love, that is what it is all about in the end. No one ever was on their deathbed saying they wished they had worked harder or gone to the office earlier or become a more important person. They all say they wished they had spent more time with the ones they love. Don't let it pass you by, give the roses now.

Answer 9

There is no right or wrong answer here. It would be impossible to truely judge one answer better or worse than another.

Each person will have their own meaning of life. To them it is extremely important, to you it may be meaningless. The same as your meaning of life might sound silly to me.

Answer 10

A nectarine
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Answer 11

do me a big favor lad?...you need to watch this movie...
"Life is Beautiful", then come back and you will think what the meaning of life is...just a thought!
by the way, the guy Tool is right, listen to him, he knows what he's talking about.