Most people probably don’t think about this. People keep living everyday, thinking that their lives mean something; that their lives have meaning or purpose. Most people are even too busy with each their own survival mode everyday, which in today’s world/era, it usually means people are busy making money, whether it’s work, or run a business, etc etc etc.
Most people in this world are oblivious or ignorant to this harsh reality, that we are all basically just little speck of dust on this planet, let alone universe. I always use the illustration of ants: Some ants live, some ants die (from getting trampled, crushed by feet, etc etc etc). Nothing special. It’s the same with human life.
People of course will always try to rationalize this, all in a hope to convince themselves basically that life, especially their own lives, have meaning & purpose. And that each individual matters; each person matters. But in the grand scheme of things, the harsh truth is nothing really matters (well, perhaps unless if we could somehow defy reality, whether perhaps through space travel, immortality, transhumanism/posthumanism, AI (artificial intelligence), VR (virtual reality), etc etc etc; but nothing is guaranteed for sure, in reality again). Everything we do will eventually just crumbles to the dust. So why bother?
Today there is even now a popular ‘hype’ philosophy like “optimistic nihilism”. But to me personally, it’s just the same basically with hedonism, which basically it all sounds the same, eg: “just live in the present moment, enjoy life, since we only live once!”. But again, is this all there is to life? existence? It still feels pointless, in the end, in the grand scheme of things.
3 comments
We were always a pretty small portion of actual reality. One of the things that always got me was deep time. I was born in 1988, almost 35 years ago. That seems like a long time, to me.
humans have been writing history for the past 30,000 years, my life is less than a tenth of a percent of that.
Further, humanity has been around 300,000 years. My life is less than a hundredth of that.
Further still, the Earth has existed for 3.5 billion years, my life less than a ten millionth of that.
—-
I like that humanity keeps trying to defy statistics by surviving. It isn’t possible to know your personal impact because the amount of time humans have yet to survive is A. Unknown and B. Probably longer than we are capable of understanding.
that I know I’d be personally missed if I was gone is some indicator that my impact is positive. If there was just five people who would be heartbroken if I was gone, that’s enough to keep me around. The reality is that it’s probably a few dozen people.
Maybe it’s a drop in the bucket for humanity. Maybe none of those people will ever matter to anyone else. To me, I see them, and I love them for what I see as a futile act of keeping me alive.
Meaning/purpose is subjectively felt, it’s not something that could exist outside of the minds that perceive it. The only things that can have significance are those that we feel are significant. So when we die, it matters to those we leave behind, and to the extent it ends a life that we felt to be meaningful, it matters to us. Those are the only things that could conceivably matter. That isn’t altered by how many of us happen to be on the planet at any one time, or how long our pursuits happen to last for.
I think things feel pointless because the expectations we had felt to be meaningful in the past are revealed to be unrealistic. Our minds then struggle to adjust to the new reality, and invest it with the same level of meaning. That’s what I feel – “if life can’t be like that, then it all feels pointless.” It’s not that existence is meaningless – it’s that the meaning is frustrated by circumstance. A world where I can be a certain type of person and live a certain kind of life feels meaningful. The reality where I am who I am and live the life I do often doesn’t.
Indeed in some ways humans are like ants, sometimes we treat one another that way.
For me, every life matters…except those people that are evil or have wronged me personally in some way.
But I do care about humans as a whole. It bothers me a lot to see people living in poverty or on the streets, esp. the mentally ill and elderly who cannot take care of themselves and our shitty gov’ts have abandoned them.
Let’s also remember that most of the world is poor, about 4 billion live in poverty, do not have adequate drinking water, electricity and other things we just take for granted in the West.
However if there was one cause that I think is worth fighting for above all, is to make euthanasia accessible to all humans on the planet.
Nobody should be forced to live a bad life and then be forced to have to end it in horrible ways that don’t succeed.
I think the other utopian fantasy some people have, is that everybody gets a job, house, electricity, water, food, etc…is a far harder goal to achieve.
I know some well meaning people think that we can “change the world” and make it better. Sure if there was a real concerted effort, esp. at the govt level, then yes, you could probably achieve it in more developed countries.
In poorer countries, it’s nearly impossible due to so much corruption and evil people at the top stealing wealth/resources meant for the masses.
Ofc we have a similar problem with mega-rich people in the West, using gov’t for their own benefit at the expense of the working class and the poor.
Which is why I go back to euthanasia, because the ability to end your life, if the nation you find yourself in really sucks or you just hate yourself, or have mental illnesses that cannot be cured easily, then at least we all get that magical exit door.
Or like in a video game, a way to leave, turn it off. Ofc bad lives don’t just affect people but animals and in a sense it’s harder for them, because they have no way out and I think few of them ever get the conscious thought (and a way) to end their own existence-so they suffer till they die from natural causes.
Anyone can find meaning in life if they wanted to. For instances I’ve had so many great experiences where I felt happy and that this was something I wanted to do all the time or it was worth living for. Say going on a fun trip, meeting someone you feel is amazing, learning new things, reading great books or listening to music and so forth.
Life does offer a large variety of interesting experiences. Ofc for some they find no meaning at all for various reasons and as Husk pointed out, it is something that is largely subjective.
So of the 8 billion of us that enjoy life and want to keep living and passing on their genes, more power to you. For others who find no meaning in life and don’t want to be around, well at the moment there aren’t many options to ‘exit’ so we’re forced to keep living and being sad/miserable etc.
In my own case, it wasn’t as bad as some people have had it, more middle of the road which is why I’m still around. I had some awesome times, but mostly my life sucked. Still I continue to live for my family (primarily) and for some goals I’d like to achieve in my life. But I’m not as attached to living as I might’ve been when I was younger.
I keep living in the hope that my life will continue to better…but if it takes a very bad turn, then I will look for a way out. I’ve suffered enough, maybe too much imo, so life has lost it’s luster for me.
So if my health fails, or I experience financial hardship with no chance of going back to my current level, or if I lose all my friends/family (say they die off), then I will look for a way out. Fortunately euthanasia is legal here in Canada, though you still have to jump some hoops to get it.
At the end of the day, that’s the same issue every person has to think about. People usually keep going while suffering is tolerable, but when it becomes intolerable then they seek to end their existence.
I hope in the future humanity finally realizes that lives matter and that we should do all we can to give everyone a good life, but at the same time allow them to end a bad one and then you’ll have a pretty good species that can extend out to the stars.