What is the meaning of life?

Question

What is the meaning of life?
When you break it down do we exist in order to continue existence, or is there more?

Answer 1

No one really knows, but I appears to me that we just wind up rotting in the ground.

Life is what you make of it, the meaning is really in what you apire to do.

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

Meaning and purpose and point of life all require God. They ask the question, "what am I meant to do here on earth?" and only our Creator can answer that question.

Purpose gives worth for we know that things that have no purpose have no worth.

If we reject God, then logically, our lives have no purpose or worth but we can't accept that answer:

"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." (Albert Camus - 1942)

So, without God, we have to invent "purposes" so that we, as you say, can continue existence. You can note that invented purposes are designed to keep us busy and focused away from thoughts about a meaningless existence.

It is only if God exists that there can be true purpose and meaning and worth.

Answer 4

We are contributors to the earth. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. That's what it takes to add substance to the earth. Why do people plant flowers, shrubs or trees at a grave site. They know the plants will be well fertilized and the worms will keep it cultivated. That is the meaning of life when you break it all down.

Answer 5

Most of the time, life becomes meaningful when we make commitments that require us to do more than work, buy, consume, and die.

Different people make different commitments.

If your most important commitment is to Judaism or Christianity, then life becomes meaningful to the extent that you follow the Greatest Commandment: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

If your most important commitment is to Buddhism, developing compassion for all creatures can give life meaning.

If you have no religion, and believe in nothing supernatural, you could do far worse than follow Bertrand Russell's maxim to live a life inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

If you are an ethical egoist, and believe that doing right means pursuing your own enlightened self-interest, you still have to do more than work, buy, consume, and die: you have to follow your dreams.

If you are the head of a family, life becomes more meaningful the more you support and interact with your fellow family members.

The meaning of life comes from commitment to more than survival.

Jim G.

Answer 6

Life would have more meaning if we could live it backwards. You start of dead and get better each day, at your 1st day of work they give you a gold watch, but with each passing work year they pay you less, you go to school knowing everything only to forget you're taught but the best part ias that you end life with an orgasm!

Answer 7

We exist in order to expand all that is. In other words, we are truly here for the experience. It isn't about learning a lesson or any of that stuff. You can think of it more as a data gathering mission. Or perhaps an experiment. But overall, we are here to create and expand the universe. We are more than what we know in this physical body. Most of our awareness is in the nonphysical, and it is that existence that is being served by our experience here. Our nonphysical selves are data gathering all the time so that everything that exists can be pushed out, made more, made better, made bigger and filled with more Love.

Answer 8

Kafka use to think that the meaning of life was that some day you will be dead, I'm not that skeptic i believe that the meaning of life is to live it, try to fulfill all the virtues so in life you can be loved, i think that at the end life its about the love you have fulfilled

Answer 9

The meaning of life lived in the world of duality is to awaken to our true natures--that is, as vehicles for the playing out of Love and Light, which is the nature of the unified field of the Absolute (as opposed to the world of duality or polarity where nothing is real due to its impermanence). In this world as human beings the charge to us is to recognize our oneness with the One by laying down our false selves, our "separate" egos, and to merge back into oneness through awareness of our true natures. This involves honing the ability to even "see" the ego at work--jealous, afraid, greedy, attached to personal outcomes, haughty, proud, insensitive, self-serving, i.e. "separated" from every "other" and from its Source. Awareness of these false selves can only come through contemplation and the practice of meditation, which clear out the egoistic "monkey mind" chatter and reveal how that runaway mind controls the ego being. Only through observation will awareness come, and only through awareness will higher mind (higher consciousness) be delivered and merging with the Divine be possible. Now I hope that "life" takes on a whole new "meaning" for you. Good luck on confronting your limiting,separated ego. I am Sirius.

Answer 10

42

Answer 11

The Meaning Of Your Lives is To HAIL DOWN TO ME!

Fetch me My Slippers And Cubin Ciggar