Well, different people have different answers to that.
The two characters that make up my name have famous speeches about that–
Hamlet, of course, has a great many speeches…for him, the point of living is, at first, if nothing else a means of not dying, because death is “The Undiscovered Country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” and the unknown is scary for Hamlet, even more so when it’s the sort of unknown realm where you can never return from, and especially because it’s death, it’s either final or the final step to eternity, however you look at it…later, the whole point of life finally resolves into his killing the king, “My thoughts be bloody or nothing worth!”–
So for Hamlet, the point of life is to 1. Avoid fear of the unknown/death, 2. Avenge his father’s death (so, basically, to attain a goal he sets for himself,) and 3. to achieve #1 via #2, that is, when he’s focusing on acting upon someone else, Hamlet is often so caught up in the moment that he’s far from hesitant (he’s often very rash, in fact) but when he’s left all alone with no one to act upon, THAT’S when the soliloquys come out and he starts to feel the fear of death and the unknown, because that’s all he has around him now, the unknown caverns of his mind and dual fear of what THAT might bring and, if he does die, what will (or will not) come after.
Sherlock Holmes sees things differently.
In the mystery “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Holmes solves a case dealing with an especially-cruel and vindictive murder…and at Christmastime, no less (at least in the excellent TV adaptation of the original short story they make it at Christmastime.) He muses to Watson about what the point of such senseless murder is, and what any of this matters–he’s a man of utter reason (after all, he’s Sherlock Holmes, the most analytical and rational man ever) and yet he cannot for the life of him see any reason in these deaths, or in a universe that allows these deaths to occur. He acknowledges what he sees as a logical paradox–
In essence, that it’s absurd that there should be any special point to any of this, but, likewise, that it seems to him absurd that nothing on Earth or in the universe have ANY meaning at all…there MUST be a point to living, he concludes, but what it is he cannot say, he can only go about his life and do what he does best and take whatever meaning he can away from THAT.
And others besides Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw it differently still–
For Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye need know on earth, and all ye need to know”–for him, beauty (and considering his biography, love) are two of the primary reasons to live…but neither are simple, not just good looks for “beauty” and all kissing and poetry for “love”…it’s something else, something deeper (what he meant by that is up for debate, he tragically died at only 25 years old, and separated from the love of HIS life at that, Ms. Fanny Brawne, since Keats wasn’t in his lifetime very wealthy and so the two could never be together due to class differences.)
For Homer and Aristotle, the point to life was to be “excellent”–to be as great as you could be in some field, and sort of “flower” in a way…their point to life would involve you constantly growing, constantly getting better at whatever it is you choose to devote yourself to, and that in itself creates meaning, as excellence and happiness for them often go hand in hand, one will lead to the other, and both create a point to life, ie, being happy and being good at something that produces greatness (or even happiness for others.)
For someone like Nietzsche or Camus or Sartre, life WAS intrinsically meaningless, there isn’t any point to it except whatever point of it you make for yourself, and even that’s just a point for yourself and often can’t be someone else’s “point of life”…Sartre believed partly in “playing a part,” that is, just choosing a role in life you want to “act” and to be “be” that…even if you’re not heroic or brave or whatever else, just to choose to act that, and avoid “acting in Bad Faith,” that is, acting but doing so with the knowledge in the back of your head that you’re being phony and so acting phonily…Sartre would have you define yourself however you want in the void of meaning–for him, it’s a blank canvas, and you have all the colors you could ever want to paint a picture for yourself, but you have to truly believe what you “paint for yourself” or you’ve failed. Nietzsche would suggest a combination of the Greek idea of excellence and what Sartre (who came after him) would develop into the idea of acting a role–that is, to through excellence redefine yourself as a sort of “Ubermensch,” that is, a “Superman” who can subvert the crudeness of the world around him and be his own entity.
For someone like Dostoyevsky, two times two equal four–that’s life, it’s cold and logical, and that’s the blessing and curse of it, that it may be ultimately and excruciating rational to the point of it being an indifferent universe and human will ceasing to matter…but he counters this idea with the assertion that if two times two is great in its logic, two times two is five is great in its rejection of logic and in its brazenly defining itself on its own terms and in terms of one’s own desires, rational or not. Dostoyevsky was a Christian, but he understood the atheistic arguments against God, and ultimately his works and novels understood those arguments but, just as he argues two times two equals five can be sublime in just how brazen it can be to reject the logical and give oneself over to a truth that’s of your own desire, he ultimately argues that in the same way the atheists have a sound logical case against God, but the point of life MUST be a belief in God or some sort of relation to something higher, because without it, life IS meaningless, and then, like Ivan Karamazov in “The Brothers Karamazov,” you go mad.
Where two and two making four was oppressively rational for Dsotoyevsky and two and two making five was liberatingly irrational, for Orwell, it’s just the opposite. His Wisnton Smith famously affirmed that as long as you could say two plus two equals four and have it be true, “all else follows,” you can be rational and make your own free choices, but the second a government or religion or your own irrationality forces you to say two plus two equals five, you’ve surrendered over and can no longer be an individual–and if there’s one thing Orwell wanted for people in life, it was for them to be individuals and NOT to be forced into or defined by someone else’s defining or redefining of life and history and what’s good and bad.
And on and on.
But maybe for all those literary and philosophical heavyweights…
A children’s character, Alec Bings (Who Sees Through Things) from “The Phantom Tollbooth” said it best–
“It’s all in how you look at things…things won’t look nearly the same at fifteen as they did at ten, and at twenty everything will change again.”
If you’re not generally happy, their ain’t one, except possibly to become happy. Failing that, you’re fucked.
So the question is, what brings you happiness? If the answer is “nothing”, then you’re looking at a diagnosis of depression. What now?
Well, there’s therapy and drugs. That even works for some people. I have a very good friend who was depressed most of her childhood and finally got better using Geodon (and a couple others whose names I don’t recall).
OK, what if the first drug doesn’t work? Well, then, you’re about average. Only 1 in 3 to 1 in 6 get permanent relief from SSRIs, which will likely be your doctor’s first choice. After that, you can try the SNRIs and the tricyclics. Personally, given how long they take to have an effect (multiple weeks at least), I wouldn’t try more than two from any one category before moving on to the next.
If those don’t work, you might be looking at a diagnosis of bipolar type 2, which means that you are just depressed and never manic, but the anti-depressants don’t work on you. Then it’s on the mood-stabalizers and type 2 atypical anti-psychotics (which aren’t necessarily as scary as they sound).
After that, as a large try at drugs, you can try an MAOI, but those things are old and stuffed up the wazoo with side effects (not that side effects are absent from the previously mentioned drugs).
If that doesn’t work, you’re pretty much done with drugs. Then (or even before that point) you might want to try things like more exercise, fish oil (at lot of thought right now says that depression is an inflamation of the frontal cortex, and fish oil is a natural anti-inflamatory). Light therapy might be tried, especially if your moods are tied to the season. Thyroid therapy may work (the thyroid can go bonkers and cause depression, which, natch, anti-depressants will do nothing for). Sleep apnea can also cause it, in which case you can get rapid treatment with a CPAP.
That’s pretty much everything I can think of right now. I’m sorry if this came across as trying to “fix” you rather than lending a sympathetic ear, but these are the things I’ve learned over the last ten years of hell myself, so I just wanted to put them out there.
Because they are taught to expect more than exists… for various reasons.
Life doesn’t need to have a “point,” and thinking there needs to be a reason for it, is flawed.
The reason is that your parents had sex, which resulted in you being born.
You exist. You’re alive. You’re an organic, self-aware entity, and you have a mobile vessel with which you may interact with your environment, in countless ways. If you look at your environment and decide there is nothing with which you desire to interact, then perhaps another environment or set of conditions will produce something interesting and appealing?
I personally tend to think that the “point” is to enjoy the things i’ve discovered that are enjoyable, and try to cause myself to feel good, while i am alive to have the ability to do so. However, that “point” tends to get quite obstructed by external (and even internal) obstacles, and so i find myself rarely experiencing the enjoyment i seek, which is the “point” of continuing this life as Me.
It’s discouraging. But the reason i’m still here, is because, while they are often seemingly out of reach, i realize that most of those things i enjoy, do actually exist, and i still want to enjoy them.
However, desire and expectation are very different. Though i desire to enjoy things that actually exist and are technically possible, i do not expect to be able to attain the enjoyment of those things, due to the obstacles i haven’t figured out how to overcome. It’s exhausting, living without the enjoyment of those things, while trying to figure out how to reach them, and discouraging when i think that i will not be able to do so.
So… to simplify, the point is to do what you want. The problem is how that point is devalued when you cannot… which then “habituates” activities and tendencies, which become your life, instead of the things you wanted to do.
Do what you want to do. If you don’t know what that is, look around, and keep looking. If you find that you know, but can’t do it, figure out why, and if there’s a solution. If you can’t find a solution, figure out why you can’t find one. If you get overwhelmed by the daunting nature of this personal development, figure out how to manifest a self that has enough energy to do what you need to do, to figure out what you need to figure out, so you can become able to do what you want…
So you can enjoy the things that can make you feel good, while you’re alive to do so, until you cannot.
We’ll all die someday, somehow… so you might as well try to enjoy enough of life to make death worth the life you lead.
What’s to say there’s no point in chance?
What is a point, anyhow?
There is a point to your pen.
I’m rather glad I’m not like a pen.
It would get unbelievably boring having to perform the same function until my ink ran dry.
I rather like making it up as I go along.
It’s much more interesting that way.
10 comments
If there were just one point, and I don’t think it’s that limited in reality, I would say to make your environment better for having you there.
Good question!
no matter what happens nothing is ever good enough..
Good enough for who? You? Or other people?
Well, different people have different answers to that.
The two characters that make up my name have famous speeches about that–
Hamlet, of course, has a great many speeches…for him, the point of living is, at first, if nothing else a means of not dying, because death is “The Undiscovered Country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” and the unknown is scary for Hamlet, even more so when it’s the sort of unknown realm where you can never return from, and especially because it’s death, it’s either final or the final step to eternity, however you look at it…later, the whole point of life finally resolves into his killing the king, “My thoughts be bloody or nothing worth!”–
So for Hamlet, the point of life is to 1. Avoid fear of the unknown/death, 2. Avenge his father’s death (so, basically, to attain a goal he sets for himself,) and 3. to achieve #1 via #2, that is, when he’s focusing on acting upon someone else, Hamlet is often so caught up in the moment that he’s far from hesitant (he’s often very rash, in fact) but when he’s left all alone with no one to act upon, THAT’S when the soliloquys come out and he starts to feel the fear of death and the unknown, because that’s all he has around him now, the unknown caverns of his mind and dual fear of what THAT might bring and, if he does die, what will (or will not) come after.
Sherlock Holmes sees things differently.
In the mystery “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” Holmes solves a case dealing with an especially-cruel and vindictive murder…and at Christmastime, no less (at least in the excellent TV adaptation of the original short story they make it at Christmastime.) He muses to Watson about what the point of such senseless murder is, and what any of this matters–he’s a man of utter reason (after all, he’s Sherlock Holmes, the most analytical and rational man ever) and yet he cannot for the life of him see any reason in these deaths, or in a universe that allows these deaths to occur. He acknowledges what he sees as a logical paradox–
In essence, that it’s absurd that there should be any special point to any of this, but, likewise, that it seems to him absurd that nothing on Earth or in the universe have ANY meaning at all…there MUST be a point to living, he concludes, but what it is he cannot say, he can only go about his life and do what he does best and take whatever meaning he can away from THAT.
And others besides Shakespeare and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw it differently still–
For Keats, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all ye need know on earth, and all ye need to know”–for him, beauty (and considering his biography, love) are two of the primary reasons to live…but neither are simple, not just good looks for “beauty” and all kissing and poetry for “love”…it’s something else, something deeper (what he meant by that is up for debate, he tragically died at only 25 years old, and separated from the love of HIS life at that, Ms. Fanny Brawne, since Keats wasn’t in his lifetime very wealthy and so the two could never be together due to class differences.)
For Homer and Aristotle, the point to life was to be “excellent”–to be as great as you could be in some field, and sort of “flower” in a way…their point to life would involve you constantly growing, constantly getting better at whatever it is you choose to devote yourself to, and that in itself creates meaning, as excellence and happiness for them often go hand in hand, one will lead to the other, and both create a point to life, ie, being happy and being good at something that produces greatness (or even happiness for others.)
For someone like Nietzsche or Camus or Sartre, life WAS intrinsically meaningless, there isn’t any point to it except whatever point of it you make for yourself, and even that’s just a point for yourself and often can’t be someone else’s “point of life”…Sartre believed partly in “playing a part,” that is, just choosing a role in life you want to “act” and to be “be” that…even if you’re not heroic or brave or whatever else, just to choose to act that, and avoid “acting in Bad Faith,” that is, acting but doing so with the knowledge in the back of your head that you’re being phony and so acting phonily…Sartre would have you define yourself however you want in the void of meaning–for him, it’s a blank canvas, and you have all the colors you could ever want to paint a picture for yourself, but you have to truly believe what you “paint for yourself” or you’ve failed. Nietzsche would suggest a combination of the Greek idea of excellence and what Sartre (who came after him) would develop into the idea of acting a role–that is, to through excellence redefine yourself as a sort of “Ubermensch,” that is, a “Superman” who can subvert the crudeness of the world around him and be his own entity.
For someone like Dostoyevsky, two times two equal four–that’s life, it’s cold and logical, and that’s the blessing and curse of it, that it may be ultimately and excruciating rational to the point of it being an indifferent universe and human will ceasing to matter…but he counters this idea with the assertion that if two times two is great in its logic, two times two is five is great in its rejection of logic and in its brazenly defining itself on its own terms and in terms of one’s own desires, rational or not. Dostoyevsky was a Christian, but he understood the atheistic arguments against God, and ultimately his works and novels understood those arguments but, just as he argues two times two equals five can be sublime in just how brazen it can be to reject the logical and give oneself over to a truth that’s of your own desire, he ultimately argues that in the same way the atheists have a sound logical case against God, but the point of life MUST be a belief in God or some sort of relation to something higher, because without it, life IS meaningless, and then, like Ivan Karamazov in “The Brothers Karamazov,” you go mad.
Where two and two making four was oppressively rational for Dsotoyevsky and two and two making five was liberatingly irrational, for Orwell, it’s just the opposite. His Wisnton Smith famously affirmed that as long as you could say two plus two equals four and have it be true, “all else follows,” you can be rational and make your own free choices, but the second a government or religion or your own irrationality forces you to say two plus two equals five, you’ve surrendered over and can no longer be an individual–and if there’s one thing Orwell wanted for people in life, it was for them to be individuals and NOT to be forced into or defined by someone else’s defining or redefining of life and history and what’s good and bad.
And on and on.
But maybe for all those literary and philosophical heavyweights…
A children’s character, Alec Bings (Who Sees Through Things) from “The Phantom Tollbooth” said it best–
“It’s all in how you look at things…things won’t look nearly the same at fifteen as they did at ten, and at twenty everything will change again.”
Take that for what it’s worth. 😉
If you’re not generally happy, their ain’t one, except possibly to become happy. Failing that, you’re fucked.
So the question is, what brings you happiness? If the answer is “nothing”, then you’re looking at a diagnosis of depression. What now?
Well, there’s therapy and drugs. That even works for some people. I have a very good friend who was depressed most of her childhood and finally got better using Geodon (and a couple others whose names I don’t recall).
OK, what if the first drug doesn’t work? Well, then, you’re about average. Only 1 in 3 to 1 in 6 get permanent relief from SSRIs, which will likely be your doctor’s first choice. After that, you can try the SNRIs and the tricyclics. Personally, given how long they take to have an effect (multiple weeks at least), I wouldn’t try more than two from any one category before moving on to the next.
If those don’t work, you might be looking at a diagnosis of bipolar type 2, which means that you are just depressed and never manic, but the anti-depressants don’t work on you. Then it’s on the mood-stabalizers and type 2 atypical anti-psychotics (which aren’t necessarily as scary as they sound).
After that, as a large try at drugs, you can try an MAOI, but those things are old and stuffed up the wazoo with side effects (not that side effects are absent from the previously mentioned drugs).
If that doesn’t work, you’re pretty much done with drugs. Then (or even before that point) you might want to try things like more exercise, fish oil (at lot of thought right now says that depression is an inflamation of the frontal cortex, and fish oil is a natural anti-inflamatory). Light therapy might be tried, especially if your moods are tied to the season. Thyroid therapy may work (the thyroid can go bonkers and cause depression, which, natch, anti-depressants will do nothing for). Sleep apnea can also cause it, in which case you can get rapid treatment with a CPAP.
That’s pretty much everything I can think of right now. I’m sorry if this came across as trying to “fix” you rather than lending a sympathetic ear, but these are the things I’ve learned over the last ten years of hell myself, so I just wanted to put them out there.
Probably this…
1. Born
2. Get educated
3. Get a job
4. Get Married
5. Have kids
6. Achieve your goals
7. Do the things you enjoy
8. Grow old
9. Die
Why do people expect life to have a “point?”
Because they are taught to expect more than exists… for various reasons.
Life doesn’t need to have a “point,” and thinking there needs to be a reason for it, is flawed.
The reason is that your parents had sex, which resulted in you being born.
You exist. You’re alive. You’re an organic, self-aware entity, and you have a mobile vessel with which you may interact with your environment, in countless ways. If you look at your environment and decide there is nothing with which you desire to interact, then perhaps another environment or set of conditions will produce something interesting and appealing?
I personally tend to think that the “point” is to enjoy the things i’ve discovered that are enjoyable, and try to cause myself to feel good, while i am alive to have the ability to do so. However, that “point” tends to get quite obstructed by external (and even internal) obstacles, and so i find myself rarely experiencing the enjoyment i seek, which is the “point” of continuing this life as Me.
It’s discouraging. But the reason i’m still here, is because, while they are often seemingly out of reach, i realize that most of those things i enjoy, do actually exist, and i still want to enjoy them.
However, desire and expectation are very different. Though i desire to enjoy things that actually exist and are technically possible, i do not expect to be able to attain the enjoyment of those things, due to the obstacles i haven’t figured out how to overcome. It’s exhausting, living without the enjoyment of those things, while trying to figure out how to reach them, and discouraging when i think that i will not be able to do so.
So… to simplify, the point is to do what you want. The problem is how that point is devalued when you cannot… which then “habituates” activities and tendencies, which become your life, instead of the things you wanted to do.
Do what you want to do. If you don’t know what that is, look around, and keep looking. If you find that you know, but can’t do it, figure out why, and if there’s a solution. If you can’t find a solution, figure out why you can’t find one. If you get overwhelmed by the daunting nature of this personal development, figure out how to manifest a self that has enough energy to do what you need to do, to figure out what you need to figure out, so you can become able to do what you want…
So you can enjoy the things that can make you feel good, while you’re alive to do so, until you cannot.
We’ll all die someday, somehow… so you might as well try to enjoy enough of life to make death worth the life you lead.
there is no point to life. we’re her by chance. bad fucking luck.
What’s to say there’s no point in chance?
What is a point, anyhow?
There is a point to your pen.
I’m rather glad I’m not like a pen.
It would get unbelievably boring having to perform the same function until my ink ran dry.
I rather like making it up as I go along.
It’s much more interesting that way.