I’ve never understood the point of this life. When I ask people they often say, “Well, you graduate from college, get a job and start a family.” My only answer is, “And?” What comes after having a family and everything else you’ve worked so hard to obtain?
Death.
If in the end, no matter what we do, we all die, then what is the point of living? For those who believe in afterlife or a heaven after we die maybe life has a meaning. But to someone who doesn’t believe in anything, what’s the point? There are more than 7.046Â billion people on earth. Millions of people are born every year and millions die. Unless you’ve done something important in your life you just become another number. Nobody cares. And even if they do, after a few years you’ll be nothing but a memory to them; you’re contribution to this world will have been forgotten.
Everyone was born to die, so does it really make a difference whether we do it at 17 or at 80? Would it make a difference if you were alive of dead?
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I feel the same way as you. What’s the Point. Nothing matters. It’s an existential depression. Look it up. It makes sense.
A human life exists in such an infinitesimal space of time and has such an infinitesimal impact on the overall structure of what we know for a fact is our physical universe. A human life is meaningless.
However that doesn’t translate to there being no point. The same as there being no afterlife.
It’s my best guess on what death is. A big fat nothing.
That doesn’t mean there is no point to life.
Find things that make you feel good. Do them. Stay away from things that don’t make you feel good.
Had enough of feeling good. Opt out. An eternal nothing. It’s sounded nice to me on more than a few occasions but I’ve still had one or two things I want to do before I embrace that silence.
You have the curse that most intelligent people have and there isn’t a cure for it.
It doesn’t make it wrong.
People who claim that live is meaningless often forgot that what is meaningful depends on one’s principal values and that you can’t deduce these principal values from anything. They are like a set of mathematical axioms. If even in the most fundamental and abstract mental constructs you have to take things for granted, then surely you have to do so when deciding what is meaningful.
Indeed, most of the time when I hear people claiming that everything is pointless I only hear them talking about a special case of the following triviality: you can’t deduce “A is”, but only “A is if B is”.
Also, is this “eternal nothing” so obvious? To quote a song I like:
“forever in darkness, forever once more”.
There has been an eternity before your birth just as much as there is one after it. Still you are here now.
Life is inherently meaningless. But that doesn’t mean we can’t or shouldn’t invent meaning for anything that occurs while we’re alive to be aware and experience. And even if the invented meaning isn’t “given” or “innate,” we can still choose to highly value whatever meaning we apply to all this… or we can choose to utterly disregard all invented meaning, as if nothing that we have to create, that isn’t already here when we arrive, can ever have value. But that puts all the “power” in the hands of convention and established precedence, which results in people doing things and in ways, “just because that’s how it’s always been,” which leaves no room for change or improvement, and no room to create a new and more valuable meaning (the only purpose of “meaning” is to feel as though our actions/experiences are actually important; some of us noticed that even meaningless actions can be very important, or even very detrimental, both to ourselves, and others).
Bottom line: it’s up to you, to decide whether “meaning” has any meaning to you, or is at all important or valuable. Even “meaning” can be utterly meaningless. Even “meaningless” can be either utterly meaningful, or utterly meaningless.
When a leaf begins as a bud in the spring it’s doomed to turn colors and fall to the ground. Thousands of leaves in a single tree begin in the spring and die in the fall. Through each of their lives they collected sun, rain and nourished the tree so it could grow year after year. That was their purpose. That’s what they were born to accomplish. Then the tree itself will finally die when it started as an acorn buried in the ground. Through it’s life it gave oxygen to the air, held the soil with its strong roots, maybe prevented a river from over flowing it’s banks and in death it will fertilize the soil for the next generation of trees. So, why are we here as humans? We breath the air, collect water and food then nourish the soil with our decaying bodies. Hopefully we’ve helped the next generation of humans by making this world better than we found it.
That was beautiful
Randall, that was one of the coolest comments I’ve read on here today. 🙂
Love it Randall, bravo!
It seems like everyone is over-complicating things here.
The post is basically saying, “If we die, life is pointless.”
Objectively, there can be no “meaning” to anything, as it must be assigned by an agent, but I find it weird that someone would abscribe meaning only if one’s actions had some future impact.
You’re too caught up in the future. No one here whipped out the “Life is about the journey, not the destination” line. The future doesn’t matter insofar as it becomes your present.
Think about it. If you were immortal, what is the purpose of your life? To learn from it? To build an empire? All that effort no longer seems pointless, but why? Because it wasn’t taken from you in the end? Because you can continue to enjoy the benefits of all your hard work?
All that matters is that you are happy *now*. If you aren’t happy right now, than any effort is to get to your happy place and to stay there as long as possible.
I can put this to the simplest analogy in the world. Why would you ever read a book or watch a movie? They both eventually end, so what was the point? It was never about what happened *after* the book/movie. It was about enjoying the book/movie in the present moment.
Tomorrow never comes. Today is all you have.