What is the meaning and purpose of life?

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
...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
...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

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
...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
...life may actually not exist, or may be illusory )
...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
...to make life as difficult as possible for others (i.e. to compete)
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Answer 2

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 3

The meaning and purpose of life differs between everyone. My purpose for being here may be different than your's.We exist there really is no point in trying to figure out why we exist, it's what we do while we're here that's important.

Answer 4

There is no way for there to be one purpose. The world is too big. If the purpose was to create art, there would only be artists. Who would grow food? Who would produce products? Who would run countries? There cannot be any one-size-fits-all answer to your question. You must find out for yourself what your purpose is. We are all born knowing what we want to do with our lives, but these dreams quickly get forgotten in childhood. You need to rediscover your Personal Legend for yourself. That is, the impact you will make on history, the story you will leave behind that says, "I was here, and I mattered". Try reading "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coehlo. It's very good at answering this kind of question.

Answer 5

Read The Purpose Driven Life. It will help. This book makes you think. I love it!

Answer 6

Jesus was sent here to tell us but we chose to believe the men who told us differently and who got us to concentrate only on the Messenger and forget about his message. The Kingdom of God was the most important message along with love of his our our God, and neighbor. The purpose of life is to learn and remember what Jesus spoke about and what God's promises are for those who will endure until Armageddon and find out what the real life is all about when we no longer have to "endure" this virtual reality of what the promised life is all about. When God's Kingdom is finally ruling the planet, He promises to fulfill every desire of our hearts... where no tear, no pain and no sorrow will ever plague us again and when death itself will be done away with.

Answer 7

The meaning is finding the purpose, after that, you no longer need to seek the meaning, Grasshopper!

Answer 8

hey...you shouldn't be calling your avatar looser face, YOU ARE NOT A LOSER, you are just as good as anyone else don't let anybody tell you otherwise.....the purpose of life, scientifically/realistically speaking is to survive. that's it, the reason why we live is to survive.were all just trying to survive. spiritually/philosophically speaking the purpose of life is to achieve peace, harmony, balance. everything seeks balance.......that's why life is a cycle, because a cycle is like a circle, which is balanced.

Answer 9

Life just is. It has no intrinsic, or built in meaning of it's own.

All the meaning that life will ever have is the meaning that you give to it.

Looks like its up to you.

Love and blessings Don

Answer 10

I don't know for sure but i think its to experience life and to grow from those experiences and to impact the world.

Answer 11

Life is a test to see if we go or Heaven or Hell. In the Christian religion, what happens when you die? You get judged by God. What influences God's judgment were your actions and decisions you made while you were on Earth. From there you'll either go to Heaven or Hell ( or purgatory, but that's another story ). I agree with Angelus too. Scientifically it is to survive, and you are so not a loser.