I’m not depressed (at the moment, well maybe a little), just feeling philosophical.
Edit: the idea of this came to me because I was pondering why people fight so hard to beat diseases and live a few more years. What are they planning to do? Why exert effort just to be here longer when you don’t have a reason?
Just why?
The fear of death is something engrained in life. For some, the fear of death is higher than the fear of suffering in life.
Find a priest and do what they say lol. 99% of the time they also coincide with what your king wants from you.
Or make your own.
Man, could you imagine if there was a single meaning to life? That would be miserable. Every single action you do would have to be for fulfilling that one single purpose and if you were doing anything else you’d be failing. Want to play video games? You’re not fulfilling The Purpose. Eating, sleeping, taking a shit, sure, it’s to keep you going for The Purpose, but it’s also failing to work on it in that moment. Taking a vacation would be blasphemous.
Meaning is something applied to things better by people, and I think I prefer it that way.
There is none. And that is incredibly liberating. Choose your own path and do what makes you feel good (without harming others).
Life has no inherent meaning. It doesn’t need one. That doesn’t make it pointless either. These judgments are human constructs, not qualities of life itself.
But if someone needs a meaning in life:
The meaning of life is to give your life meaning.Find it yourself. What feels important to you? What makes you unhappy? What makes you happy?
I tend to be on the empathetic side. I feel a lot of pain and desperation about the state of the world, and the way we humans treat one another so cruelly. That’s why I am trying to find my own way to contribute, so that life, for us and those who follow, becomes permanently better.
Life has the meaning you choose to give it.
I remember when I learned about the vastness of space when I was, like, 6. I sat up that night just thinking about how incredibly huge the universe is, and how nothing on one random planet amongst it all could ever really matter. Then I thought “Well, I matter because I want to matter,” and went to bed. Sometimes the simplicity of childhood can help answer the most paralyzing of philosophical quandaries.
There’s no meaning to life. We are an accidental self sustaining chemical reaction that has lasted for billions of years. There’s no creator, no higher power, nothing waiting for us when we die.
We’re also about to go extinct and are way past the window of being able to save ourselves. You and I are among the last humans that will ever exist.
And IMO that’s extremely comforting once you actually internalize it. Focus on making you and the people around you happy in the short time you’re here, don’t worry about the far future because it doesn’t matter.
It’s a bit ridiculous to me why you’d think that we’d be the last humans to exist. Habitable zones will keep existing after climate change kills 99% of the population. Even full-scale nuclear war will leave most dead, but not all.
The remainder will probably keep reproducing and survive. Even 0.001% of our current population would likely mean humanity would continue.
What else do you think would make humanity 100% extinct?
I think the answer to your last question is “doomsaying”. Its a fucking cult and its hardwired in the Lemmy community. I agree with you though. Society might fall, a large portion of humanity might die, but we will not go extinct. We’re cockroaches. We don’t go out easily.
I’m not trying to convince you on this, but this is my personal belief:
There are runaway reactions already being triggered in the atmosphere that will make the planet hotter and hotter without stopping or slowing down for millions of years. Where are you going to live when the minimum temperature is 60C or higher? A difference of 30C or so is enough to make life impossible for us but isn’t even a rounding error compared to the temperature range of a planet. Look at Mars.
Will it happen in the next few centuries or even millennia? No. But those timescales are miniscule compared to the life of the Earth or the lifecycle of an entire species.
We will be the cause of not just climate “change”, but pretty much a life reset. Like the asteroid. EVERY animal larger than 10 or so cm will die. There’s no way out of it. This is the great filter.
It might be interesting to you that the total number of humans who have lived and died is about 110 billion. So in the last 100 years or so 10% of all humans who ever existed were born.
And regarding the warming for millions of years, I think we had multiple periods on earth with higher CO2 levels. No humans existed back then but life in general was quite fine. We are at about 400 ppm right now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_the_atmosphere_of_Earth#/media/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
Not to be too optimistic, we are heading for an unprecedented crisis. But reducing emissions matters because we are not going to go inevitably extinct.
Yeah, we have hard times ahead, and probably a lot of people will die, but I don’t see humanity go extinct any time soon.
I recommend to watch “A case for optimism” from Melodysheep , which goes into that a lot more.
There’s no conflict with the whole chem stuff and life having a meaning. Something accidentally can still create its own meaning
At a macro level, it’s the preservation of our species. On a micro level, it whatever makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others (because that would conflict with macro).
pet cats
and make things better
Well, if you’re feeling philosophical I think you’d first need to address your presupposition that life has or is meant to have any meaning whatsoever.
Like, according to who? And how did they determine that? Would you be sad if it turns out there isn’t any underlying meaning?
Absurdism - How to Party At the End of Meaning
I very much love exurb1a but I think I particularly love this one most of all.
“Why am I here” is the question that precedes “Why is ANYTHING here?!”, and I think that to answer both (or even consider them as valid questions, as you pointed out!) with any degree of ‘objectivity’ (because if not you can always just go with “it’s whatever you want the answer to be!”) you’re gonna need to go through that external uncreated intelligence…Y’all know where I’m going with this. 😅
The questions “why am I here” or “why is anything here” are irrelevant. They are also unanswerable, you might as well ask “why is green seven?” And adding a supernatural deity into the mix won’t help either, because then you need to ask “who created Zeus?” And “why is Zeus here?” - it doesn’t answer the (irrelevant) question, it only adds a layer of complexity.
You mean “who created Odin” and “why is Odin” here ofc.
They’ve been asked since we started thinking BIGLY until today, so they don’t seem that “irrelevant”… 😉
For me, i like to look at Life like beeing on an adventure over time. The Goal is death, but that Goal is meaningless, as long as the journey to it was meaningless. The adventure itself could have been good, bad, regular or irregular, it does not matter. Experiencing those Things was the meaning to that adventure. As we had no choice, no say in being born, therefore starting this adventure involuntarily, we should Not try to move along the adventures voluntarily. Death will come involuntarily too, so there is no point in stopping it short (reducing the meaning of said adventure before our Goal is reached).
I work at a hospital and most of the patients there are definitely older than dirt people getting surgeries just to extend their life a few years or even months. Most of the time it is family members making those decisions because they don’t want or know how to say goodbye. We have had patients that effectively died, but the family insists on keeping their organs alive with machines in the hopes that they wake up.
As for the meaning of life? I think it is 100% to entertain ourselves until death. Even if there was a greater meaning created by some deity, we’re probably not able to understand it anymore than a donkey could understand calculus. I personally could never trust any human to tell me who or what god is and/or wants. And god has yet to reveal theirself to me…
Life doesn’t come with a meaning, you are free to find one that speaks to you
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I dissagree, I don’t think about death on a day to day basis. When I’m procrastinating I don’t think “I’m going to die some day I should get this thing done” Maybe it’s just me but the thought of death does not give me motivation to keep living my life.
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I bet you are under 40.
Life doesn’t need death to be worthwhile, neither does it need diseases or the urgent need to take a dump.
That’s the beauty. Given that there is no goal, you are able to define your own.
TBH, yeah, that’s what I consider the point of my life - amusing myself until death. Whatever I do will not matter in 100, 1000 or 1000000 years which is all just a blip in the scale of the universe. So basically, I’m just trying to have fun and help other people have fun. Of course I realize that I’m incredibly privileged to live a life where I don’t have to worry about too much and I can think about fun and not surviving. I experienced difficult periods in my life and the answer to this question was much, much harder back then.
Rational hedonism rocks.
