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) -
2007-12-30 05:23:27
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answer #1
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answered by Jayaraman 7
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I have been asking myself this question for the past 10 years. Since I have become a Christian now, to me, what I live for is to work for God's will, that is, God's purpose of making me here on Earth. We couldn't be possibly hatched out from an egg somewhere and just loiter round awaiting decaying of the mortal flesh, even if our closed ones have made us lose the meaning in life.
2007-12-29 22:44:52
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answer #2
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answered by Blessed Person :-) 3
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the meaning of life is 42 .... haha .... if you mean the purpose of life that might be a better question and simpler to answer ... the purpose of life is the biological continuum living eating breeding becoming compost we are part of a cycle ... what did you mean by the word meaning?? if you meant the reason for life than it is like the purpose if you meant what does it mean to live then it is also the purpose ... first we need the significance of the question clarified so you are asking a single interpretation of the word that asks the question.
2007-12-29 23:36:15
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answer #3
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answered by fred b 1
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Read the Holy Bible, it is all in. A life of an individual is being fulfilled when he had ceased being an individual and became a half of an essential, indivisible unit of his nation. And when he had understood the aim of this unit is to work not for its own avail, but for that of its nation - today just as centuries of years ago.
2007-12-29 22:52:47
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answer #4
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answered by Mirka 2
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I am hoping we have been put on earth to have children and bring them up morally and environmentally more aware so as to make a better world. Hopefully in the future there will be no
judgemental people only those wanting to help each other for the sake of mankind.
2007-12-29 22:37:16
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answer #5
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answered by Dianne S 2
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In species terms -- Survive, reproduce. Simple.
In conscious thought terms -- Survive, meet people, discover ones purpose in life, discover one's origins, learn all one can, reproduce, master a skill, be loved by others, fulfill self goals, pass away peacefully (or find the key to everlasting life, whichever comes first)
2007-12-29 22:37:12
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answer #6
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answered by ? 3
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isnt the true meaning of life different for everyone i mean what i think is important may not be the same as you but that's ok don't try to force yours on me & i wont try to force mine on you, give it up on getting the right answer here man has been asking that question since the beginning of time sorry know its not the answer you were looking for
2007-12-29 22:44:29
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answer #7
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answered by Anonymous
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We are living on the earth to make the unseen seen through the 3rd dimension of physical life. The importance of our life, is to just be -humans being.
2016-05-28 00:51:15
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answer #8
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answered by garnet 3
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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.....
2007-12-31 18:52:46
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answer #9
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answered by Its not me Its u 7
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the meaning of life is to take care of your soul throughout "a sea of troubles", to love and care, to be loved and be deserted and love again; to live all that a human must live and to go your own way.
2007-12-29 22:41:11
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answer #10
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answered by rakestake 1
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Add new dimensions to what animals do so to lend greater meaning to the cause and effect phenomena.
2008-01-02 22:12:25
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answer #11
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answered by Ishan26 7
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