meaning 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)

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 big secret to life is that it -has- no big secret.
The meaning of life is that it -has- no single meaning. Each person has to reach within themselves and find out what life means to them. And the answer will be different for everybody because we are all different.
Trouble is that most people never bother to do that and, as a result, they end up unhappy and disillusioned because they believed what somebody else told them about the meaning of life and what would make them happy.

Doug

Answer 4

The meaning of life is to try to understand the meaning of life.

(what is 42?)

Answer 5

The meaning of life is a process of change and creation. At every moment you are defining who you are in relationship to what you see, feel or whatever. Life on earth is created to give you a polarized context in which to realize your highest self. Read Conversations With God by Neale Donald Walsh...

Answer 6

42

Answer 7

None.

We're here because of a statistical fluke. There are billions of planets in the universe capable of supporting life. On several hundred or several thousand, life just happened to have occurred, and on a few of those - like ours - intelligent life evolved.

Because we are here, we might as well make the most of it. I believe we have a moral obligation to maximize our potential. Do what you can to better yourself, your body, your mind, your home, your career, your relationships, your community, your country, and the world.

Answer 8

The meaning of life is to survive and to fulfill one's values. Happiness is the meaning of life. Enjoy yourself, find meaningful work, enjoy the company of your fellow man, have good meals, overcome problems.

Answer 9

To spend my time on Yahoo Answers writing trite responses to the question: "What is the meaning of life?"

Answer 10

Your question is so simple that takes hours of time and reams of pages to answer. In simple, the LIFE is Long Individual Finest Experience. For somebody the LIFE is Long Individual Frustrating Experience.

Answer 11

Did u know what secret powers u have inside u and that we all have the same powers and that we can share them!
U agree that the human being is a biological entity, powered by an eternal soul living in a walking talking computer that has to be programmed from youth just like any other computer, and that is why as u can network computers together to make them stronger you can network people together and their powers to do God Like things, like teleport anywhere, deflect comets with our minds, fold space and time, cure ourselves of any disease pool our powers together and there's nothing we can't do, the question is can we break away from killing ourselves and our planet, and become enlightened enough to really implement change and truly evolve into what we were created to be in the first place, to realize our true potential, and to live in peace and harmony, and once and for alltime bring a utopia here on earth. For after all the earth in herself is a miracle and we should realize that we are in a living being, respect her and ourselves, my question can we do it, can we save ourselves n the world
check your bible dude... at 1st all i believed in was what my leaders told me, till i found out what they believed in was also taught to them by their leaders as well.. question is, is the source true?? conclusion of life...fear GOD and keep his commands(greek word; fear meaning respect for authority. And GOD of course is the highest for he made u & me, the creator) . What you fear is what you will serve dude.. if peepz wud jst fear GOD then this place wud b utopia..but fact is it will never be, GOD has higher plans and wil only let u in his secrets wen he see's dat u fear him. anyway, check revelations in ur bible dude... and f u believe it then he'd tel u something...
ps. things that you don't see are more real then the things you do dee. get the picture