What does life mean to you, or is there a meaning?

Answer 1

The philosophical 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.

These questions are separate from the scientific issue of the boundary between things with life and inanimate objects.
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. The responses are shown to overlap in many ways but may be grouped into the following categories:

Survival and temporal success
...to live every day like it is your last and to do your best at everything that comes before you
...to be always satisfied
...to live, go to school, work, and die
...to participate in natural human evolution, or to contribute to the gene pool of the human race
...to advance technological evolution, or to actively develop the future of intelligent life
...to compete or co-operate with others
...to destroy others who harm you, or to practice nonviolence and nonresistance
...to gain and exercise power
...to leave a legacy, such as a work of art or a book
...to eat
...to prepare for death
...to spend life in the pursuit of happiness, maybe not to obtain it, but to pursue it relentlessly.
...to produce offspring through sexual reproduction (alike to participating in evolution)
...to protect and preserve one's kin, clan, or tribe (akin to participating in evolution)
...to seek freedom, either physically, mentally or financially
...to observe the ultimate fate of humanity to the furthest possible extent
...to seek happiness and flourish, experience pleasure or celebrate
...to survive, including the pursuit of immortality through scientific means (see life extension)
...to attempt to have many sexual conquests (as in Arthur Schopenhauer's will to procreate)
...to find and take over all free space in this "game" called life
...to seek and find beauty
...to kill or be killed
...No point. Since having a point is a condition of living human consciousness. Animals do not need a point to live or exist. It is more of an affliction of consciousness that there are such things as points, a negative side to evolutionary development for lack of better words.

Wisdom and knowledge
...to master and know everything
...to be without questions, 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 understand and be mindful of creation or the cosmos
...to lead the world towards a desired situation
...to satisfy the natural curiosity felt by humans about life

Ethical
...to express compassion
...to follow the "Golden Rule"
...to give and receive love
...to work for justice and freedom
...to live in peace with yourself and each other, and in harmony with our natural environment (see utopia)
...to protect humanity, or more generally the environment
...to serve others, or do good deeds

Religious and spiritual
...to find perfect love and a complete expression of one's humanness in a relationship with God
...to achieve a supernatural connection within the natural context
...to achieve enlightenment and inner peace
...to become like God, or divine
...to glorify God
...to experience personal justice (i.e. to be rewarded for goodness)
...to experience existence from an infinite number of perspectives in order to expand the consciousness of all there is (i.e. to seek objectivity)
...to be a filter of creation between heaven and hell
...to produce useful structure in the universe over and above consumption (see net creativity)
...to reach Heaven in the afterlife
...to seek and acquire virtue, to live a virtuous life
...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 discover who you are
...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)

Philosophical
...to give life meaning
...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 know the meaning of life
...to achieve self-actualisation
...all possible meanings have some validity (see existentialism)
...life in itself has no meaning, for its purpose is an opportunity to create that meaning, therefore:
...to die
...to simply live until one dies (there is no universal or celestial purpose)
...nature taking its course (the wheel of time keeps on turning)
...whatever you see you see, as in "projection makes perception"
...there is no purpose or meaning whatsoever (see nihilism)
...life may actually not exist, or may be illusory (see solipsism or nihilism)
...to contemplate "the meaning of the end of life"

Other
...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 participate in the inevitable increase in entropy of the universe
...to make conformists' lives miserable (see nonconformism)
...to make life as difficult as possible for others (i.e. to compete)
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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

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 4

Thanks for asking the most intelligent. It is said in the Vedas that if this question doesn't arise for the living being ten they are considered no more than an animal in consciousness. Animals eat sleep mate and defend as do humans but humans have the intelligence to question their existence and relationship to God. The purpose of life is to reconnect with our Creator also known as Krishna, Allah, Jehovah, Vishnu, etc. (One God Many Names) This material world is not our real home, it is called May (illusion) and is temporary and full of misery. Only one fourth of the souls come here. The rest are enjoying blissful loving relationships with God and never suffer. We have to end this cycle of repeated birth, death old and disease and return Home. The quickest process to attain this is to chant the Maha Mantra (the Great Mantra for deliverance from all suffering and illusion) for info go to harekrishnatemple.com Read Bhagavad Gita As it is BY Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada-Tells the meaning and life. We are not meant to work hard like a dog just for sense gratification we are meant to serve and love God that's the facts and is the only way to be truly happy. I love it.

Answer 5

The meaning of life is growth. It gives life meaning and importance. I believe we are all here to grow and to understand the depth of ourselves. Some people work their entire lives to find a meaning to their existence. They get a degree, a good job, get married, have children and often realize the things that they obtained have not made them happier or given life meaning. You can't have the obtainable that is outside yourself and appreciate them if you don't understand enough about yourself.

Answer 6

To me life means fulfilling every one of my desires and then trying on a new set to boot, because every experience opens up new desires. Life is limitless. Sorry if that bothers you but that isn`t any of my business. Here`s to a zillion high fives!

Yes!

Answer 7

When it comes to life, i think everybody has their own explanation about what it all may mean. I m bound to think that there s really nothing that can be percieved as life, its just a name for something, thats either much much more complex, or i don't know what.....

Answer 8

Lifes a dance, and you learn as you go

Answer 9

life is for living.

Answer 10

To answer this question every time it appears on Yahoo Answers which is now about the 14th time since I've been a member.

Answer 11

Life's a diversion from death, and we must learn to enjoy it while we can before death realizes life's weaker than itself.