What is the meaning of life in the modern world?

Answer 1

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 2

This question comes up so often that we have people like EFW and smiling4 who must paste their canned answer. I try to tailor my answer, to a reasonable degree, to the specific question.

We have this great need in our human nature for worth. The philosopher Camus has this famous line about worth:

"There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that."

But we know that things that have no purpose have no worth, so we must have purpose. (meaning and worth are essentially the same concept)

Real purpose requires God as per atheist philosopher Russell:

“Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.” –Bertrand Russell

So if we reject God, then there is no purpose and no meaning and no point to life and our lives have no worth.

But because our human nature demands that our lives have worth we invent goals and deceive ourselves that those goals give us worth. When we invent these goals, we always invent praiseworthy goals, e.g. "make a difference in the world", so that we can imagine people praising us. We then deceive ourselves that the real or imagined praise is evidence of worth even though we know that most praise is just attempts to manipulate our behavior.

If we admit that our Creator might exist, we can immediately see that He must have put our need for meaning into our human nature to point us to seek Him. So if we admit God might exist, our purpose is then to seek God.

Answer 3

there are several meanings to your life in this day of age depending of the people who you talk to.

Religion(most of them): serve God or a greater Purpose(or God only knows)

Capitalists:serve the rich , unless you are rich then just make more money.

Politics: good- serve the world to make it a better place bad- serve yourself and other of power

atheists:live life to the full

Darwinism: propagate and survive

scientists: acquire knowledge(to make the world better but it could end up worse such as Einstein and the atomic weapons)

everyone else: still thinking about it

i know there are other groups but i can't think of any

Answer 4

In todays society we have no responsibilities, no committment, no morality and no value system..you can do what you want, say what you want..its ok to do drugs as long as you go to rehab after you get caught, you will be called brave you can cheat on your spouse and when you get caught can blame it on lack of affection and then get a divorce if they arent willing to allow ur indescretions..u can burn the american flag and call it freedom of speech you can be gay and be a priest or a pastor in our churches although its against everything christian, but we doint want to be unfair now..cant spank our kids for acting like fools, but we can medicate them..kids can graduate highschool with out knowing how to read, illegal aliens can invade our country and we give them money, housing, jobs, and now were gonna give them driver licenses and id cards so they can have a piece of the american dream too. What is the meaning of life?? get as much as you can while the gettin is good!!!..

Answer 5

I wonder if adding "in the modern world" would really change the same old question.

Answer 6

SOME TIMES I DOUBT THAT PEOPLE ASK QUESTIONS WITH ONE IDENTITY AND THEN ANSWER WITH OTHER IDENTITY. THAT SMILEY WANTED TO GIVE SOME QUARANIC SERMON SO HE ASKED THIS QUESTION WITH OTHER IDENTITY, MAY BE. I REQUEST HIM TO READ BOOKS OF ALL RELIGIONS, AND KNOW THE EXACT MEANING OF QUARAN AND UNDERSTAND REAL GOD.
WELL MEANING OF LIFE AT ANY TIME IS UNDERSTAND GOD IN COMPLETENESS.

Answer 7

To be the best person you can be. Have good morals and be giving, rather than selfish.