Lemmy, what's the meaning, or point if you prefer, of life? I know 42, but I'm serious. Nothing lasts, everything is meaningless - are we just amusing ourselves until death?

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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- There's no conflict with the whole chem stuff and life having a meaning. Something accidentally can still create its own meaning

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?
- "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.

Life doesn't come with a meaning, you are free to find one that speaks to you
- 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.
  
  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.

Killing landlords and slave owners.
- Amen

For me it’s succeeding in ways that are important to me. For instance for me it was getting sober from drugs and stable from bipolar. And then using my experience to help others do the same. The point is to help others have a life that is stable.
- Congrats and thank you!

The meaning of life is to give life meaning

Other people.
Make connections in your little circle/tribe; make people happy. It's our biology, it's what we evolved to do, and it's what you leave behind.
- 42 is the optimum human tribe size imo

Hedonic threadmill: it's the hypothesis that we tend to a baseline level of happiness and on average, after some time, people who have won the lottery are as happy (or unhappy) as people who have gone bankrupt.
Look at us, we are apes, barely out of trees. We were fighting predators and cold and diseases that no longer exist. Just by being alive, we are the winners of millions of years of genetic lottery, evolution, fights, love and ingenuity.
We have access to most of human knowledge through devices that fit in our pockets, can visit other countries that were legendary to our forefathers, instead of hunting wild beasts we have satellites that guide us step by step to the nearest McDonald's.
Imagine time-traveling a few generations back, describing our life to our grand-grandparents, seeing their eyes grow wide. Now imagine, at the end, telling them how ennui got to us and we can no longer find meaning in our life.

Whatever you want it to be. If that's nothing, cool. Trying to find some external thing to bestow a meaning upon you is religion.

Being alive is the only time when you can influence something, and as such, when your actions mean something.
When you're dead, it's over. There could be an opportunity for you to make something better for others or for your own enjoyment - but now all chances are gone.
So, why letting go of this amazing ability?

Being a good friend, finding what makes me happy while in some way better off, and trying to do those things.
Failing that, doing very bad things to very bad people.

That's the fun part! It's meaningless! All of it. It means you can do anything you want to do!

Life has no meaning. People will tell you it does, to give it meaning or to follow a religion, but it's all in service to deal with the fear of death.
- It can have meaning, like in helping someone in need.
  But for the rest you're quite correct IMO.

it's your life, you decide. You can also decide not to give it meaning.

Everything is meaningless, nothing matters. Therefore whatever you decide is important is all that matters.
You can look up optimistic nihilism if you want
- Absurdism is another (IMO better, but that's just me).

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.

I am the universe, and therefore the universe has a purpose in giving me consciousness for a lifetime. We get a lottery for what life-form we get created in (whether we're a human or a fish or a leaf) and most of that life will go just chasing the continuity of life (consuming energy, burning energy, reproducing), the rest is all made up rules of engagement in society (school, work, career, politics), all of which is "Leela" - a very believable illusion, like a game of monopoly or a very engaging play or a movie - believable, but not absolute truth. So back to the universe and why it gave me consciousness in the first place? It's just so that I can experience the universe, and see the beauty and oneness of all universe - not just the stars and the planets, but also the living forms of it - the flowers, the bugs, the pets, the wildlife, and all of the other humans on this planet, each one a unique fucking marvellous magical version of the same universe.

It doesn't have a meaning. "Meaning" is just a concept we made up to forever have something to chase after. You can endlessly ask "why" so it's like chasing one's own tail. It's the motor of the mind, fueled by the desire to finally be still.
- Pretty much, unironically. Meaning is also a false hope you put into the future. But you're better off paying attention to what's happening now, within your sense-field. Is there something in there that you genuinely want to take care of there? There's all the "meaning" people need. But the why-motor is really, really good at convincing you to chase after exponentially increasing complexity. And most people need to do it until they die, some need to despair at it so they get disillusioned with the mind (and the lucky ones find sensible wisdom traditions to get them to navigate that space without causing harm, like Zen Buddhism).
  Sidebar: And as most people have their why-motor running until the end, we of course live in cultures that are built around catching the tail of stillness, giving you so many different avenues to explore. You can have fun while doing it but you'll stop one way or another eventually.
  I really recommend you check out Waking Up App . Ignore Harris if needed, it has tons of other respectable teachers of meditation and philosophy with interesting conversations.
  Edit: Reading the thread I feel like many people here are at the "despair" but fall to nihilism. Which seems to be the natural result of intelligence meeting lack of wisdom. Abrahamic religions really dropped the ball on that one.

Why do you believe life has meaning?
I personally don't believe life has any meaning, other than the one you choose for your own life. It's rather terrifying and freeing at the same time. If there is no meaning, and if there is nothing else, no higher power, then this is it. You get the time you get, running around as self aware stardust, and then it ends. Everything that is "you" flips off one day and there is nothing but oblivion as the stardust you were slow seeps away. But, that also means that you don't have to live up to anyone else's idea of what your life should be. You can make your own path, your own meaning, and fuck the people in funny hats who try to tell you otherwise. You are you and no one else gets to define what that is.
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?
If this is all there is, if oblivion is on the other side of the door, I'll scrabble for every day existing that I can get, thank you very much. Sure, I have my own beliefs and things I would willingly accept oblivion for. But, if those aren't on the table, I'm gonna keep on existing as long as I can. It's one of the few things I'm pretty good at.
- But, that also means that you don't have to live up to anyone else's idea of what your life should be. You can make your own path, your own meaning, and fuck the people in funny hats who try to tell you otherwise. You are you and no one else gets to define what that is.
  Oh but you do. Unless you want the men in funny hats to take you off and put you in a funny jacket in a padded room, or place you in a room with bars instead of walls.
  EVERYONE else's idea of what your life should be is the standard, and if you deviate more than the standard deviation you will suffer the consequence of eeking out existence with very few choices.
  Read "The Politics of Experience" by RD Laing.
  
  (Not who you were responding to but...)
  EVERYONE else’s idea of what your life should be is the standard, and if you deviate more than the standard deviation you will suffer the consequence of eeking out existence with very few choices.
  While this is true, it's not an argument against doing exactly what you want provided that people understand that everyone else has the exact same liberty. We collectively tend towards certain values and people who deviate from those values too much eventually get sorted out one way or another. As one value most people tend towards heavily is safety, it's in everyone's best interest to find common ground with others for everyone to have safety. But it is necessarily a process with errors and learning - on everyone's side; which begets more errors and learning. Thus we will never have a perfect solution. Of course, you "conforming" to majority is also you doing exactly what you want, ultimately. Because you value your safety.
  Question the presupposed truth behind every statement.

In my view, we are here because the universe wants to understand itself.
I find solace in that.
I hope this helps your existential dread.

I read something recently that explained every moment was like a mini death (referring to how Change is the only constant) and as such everything we do is to understand and integrate death-like processes and to see them as one cohesive whole, if we extrapolate this pattern to the process of death as a human we begin to realize that our death is so much more likely to be some pattern like that where we must question if the life we had was ever so subjectively experienced to begin with, at that point we begin to realize that our death is not to be feared any more than we should fear taking off our clothes to change them when they are dirty.

Point? Like most gifts, there is no point. You just got it.
Thats how I treat my life: as a gift. Because what makes me me, existed as matter for eons. Inert. And by an insane oddity it got "infused" with life, thought, wonder but only for an extremely short while. And after that short period it will go back into that inert state. So i do nice things which are within my reach. Things that makes me feel good. And modern (western) society gives us a lot of time to do that. I know it doesn't always feel like that but if you look at it historically we have the most off time ever.
Nice things can be anything. Maybe meaningless on the Grand scale of things, but I like making my family happy. I love cuddling my stinky old dog(well, not that old), I hate gardening but love the outcome of it. And yes, I love wasting time on movies, reading, gaming, theater. Or hikes. Or travel in general. The smell of the sea. The feeling of being in a forest. That first time you played "The last of us". that one specific movie. Or read that one fantastic book. That feeling when you finished it. Or when you went to that insanely funny comedian. Or just hanged out drinking beers (or whatever )with friends or colleagues. Its all fantastic.
And most of the times I like my job and try to forward my little society with it. (I work for a municipality) Within my own little means.
So... meaning? Of life? Experience shit. Make up your own mind.
And please: don't use big tech socials. They're made so you don't feel good, get addicted to them. Get you hooked. It and it's goals (sell ads!) are evil.
I've been inert for eternity. I will not waste that little time I have. Experience something. Anything.

Why exert effort just to be here longer when you didn't have a reason?
gosh i dunno perhaps dying is fucking terrifying?

the bad news: there is no inherent meaning. the good news: this means you get to create your own. each of us do! the harsh reality is we exist against our will. nobody chose to be here and the "purpose" appears purposeless. if you ask me, there is no such thing as destiny and there is no afterlife for a soul to ascend to, so the existence you are experiencing here on Earth is profoundly unique and should be treated as your one and only. you might spend your entire life searching for a grand meaning, but the saerch is part of the discovery, because along the way you are progressing as a person, and aging and maturing through life, so you're not remaining stagnant and unchanging. it's okay if you never truly "know" who you are or where you're going--just keep doing it. you'll end up somewhere, you'll become someone.

are we just amusing ourselves until death?
IMO, yes. But just calling it "entertainment" is a bit reductionist, I think.
But yeah. And I don't see anything is wrong with that. Having a cat is cool, video games are fun, and good company is fulfilling in a powerful, indescribable, way.
To experience that kind of stuff, and for others to do the same, as much and as often as possible, is what I live for.
Yeah, there's a lot of bad stuff in the world. But I'm able to make my corner of it quite liveable. And not just for myself, but for friends and family.
I can't save the world, but I can decide to make the sliver of it that I'll interact with throughout my life, a little bit nicer.
The part I struggle with, is finding a way to make living, that makes things better, not worse. Jobs that don't contribute towards people having less and less time for the things that make life worth living, are non-existent.
- "Do good, die great"

No meaning to life besides try to live your best one. We’re all just earthlings floating on a space rock sitting in a giant void surrounded by more exploding stars

Literally? There is no reason for life. Which scares people, so they develop superstition (theology) or ascribe it to emotions (happiness, suffering, etc). There is no reason, for life. The reason for life existing or how it came to be is certainly up for debate, but there is no why. We are alive, we are conscious. Eventually our bodies give out on us, and our life ends.

The “meaning of life” is dependent on the scale.
On an intergalactic scale, practically nothing, unless you’re someone involved in some way in intergalactic travel (like Musk, potentially). On a planetary scale, your life as a political or corporate leader or humanitarian could impact generations of others. If you’re a doctor or lawyer, your life may impact tens of thousands or even generations of people. These are scales based mostly on space.
You could also look at a scale based on time. If / when the planet explodes, maybe someone like a Musk will be the only one alive today who genuinely has an impact on the human race long into the future. If you want to look at the time span of a country’s existence, someone like a Julius Cesar, a George Washington, or Adolf Hitler will have certain meaning for hundreds of years.
Your life’s meaning may yet to be realized. The point is to live your life day to day in a manner that has a positive impact on the lives that surround you. If you don’t have the impact of someone like political or corporate leader or someone like a Greta Thunberg, maybe the point of your life is to be a supporting player for someone else.
It gets difficult to find meaning if you live an isolated life. Without a family of your own, a fulfilling career, without traveling to engage with others outside your regular week’s schedule, it’s easy to say your life is meaningless. Because you haven’t made an attempt to give it meaning.
Your life doesn’t have to have meaning. But if you’re asking this kind of question and expecting someone to tell you there’s some inherit “meaning” bestowed upon you at birth, you’re not going to get a hopeful answer. That’s not to say you need to go out and look for it. It’s to say that “meaning” comes from the impact have on something, by choice or otherwise.
- My understanding of what you said:
  I may not leave a legacy, but I WILL leave a mark.
- Musk is in no way involved in intergalactic travel.
  
  Thank you. I was getting worried that some pedantic twat hadn't yet cherry picked my careful and specific wording.

The sad part of existence is not having the choice. I literally wouldn't cared if I died tomorrow. I just don't want my friends and family to be sad. That's literally the only thing keeping me here.
- same, my friend

"Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everyone's gonna die....come watch TV"

Nothing lasts [...] are we just amusing ourselves until death?
It seems to me like you are of the opinion that the finiteness of life robs it of meaning. If so, why not contribute to longevity research? It's only been a couple decades since we learned how telomeres relate to senescence. If enough people work on the problem or donate to it, we very well might be able to crack immortality before you croak. At the very least, that will give you a few more centuries to figure out what the meaning of life is.
You might object that immortality would lead to great wealth inequality, and you'd rather live a finite life than an unfair life. You can only believe this if you believe that the finality of life does not ultimately make life worthless. In which case, why not contribute to the cause of socialism?
- I'm asking why people fight to live longer, and you think I'm concerned about the finiteness of life? No. I didn't say it would have meaning if we didn't die. My point is, what does life mean? Why want to live forever?
  You don't even begin to address the question.
  
  Then why did you cite that "nothing lasts" as evidence there is no meaning to life?

Procreation and survival. That's what all living beings have as an instinct and that's the only meaning behind it. It's merely a mechanism to prevail and improve.
- This.
  I realize not everyone wants to procreate, especially in this day and age, but that is a function of our advanced and overdeveloped brains. All, if not the extremely vast majority of life on Earth clearly illustrates that this is it. What we do in the in-between is neither here nor there. This of course is from a purely biological standpoint. Add any spirituality or religion into the mix and it's a whole other ball of wax.

I like to recall some wise words of Christmas in these dark times:
Here’s the deal, newbie. You can stuff your stocking with shiny little toys from now until you grow some testicles, but until that stocking is filled with friendship, loyalty, love and devotion, well.. it’s just plumb empty.
And no, you can’t purchase those things at Laura Ashley. And no, you can’t win them in the red book giveaway extravaganza. And, gee, I’m sure if these aren’t things that you can wind up and watch spin for eight hours.
Let me make this exceptionally clear. Christmas is about love. You can’t live without other people’s love. Not during Christmas, not ever.
So go spend this time with your friends and family. And if they laugh at you, laugh with them. And if they laugh at you again, hit them and go find some new friends. But for the love of god, jesus, Mary, and Joseph and his technicolor dreamcoat, don’t ever ever forget this, newbie. You have to give love to get love. So start giving. Now.

Why live? What's the meaning of life? What's the purpose of life? I hope I don't have to explain that people have been asking this question since we first were able to form words and start thinking. You're going to get as many different opinions to answer this question as there are people to write a response. You could spend a lifetime studying philosophy and not find a definitive answer. And in the end you just have to decide for yourself which answer most speaks to you. Are you atheist, materialist, spiritual, philosophical? Take your pick.
Personally, I like Buddhist philosophy for these kinds of questions. And I suspect the Buddha would say that we are here because of craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of reality. We live because we want to exist, we want to have experiences and feel the things that are available to us as living beings. Whether it's food or sex or money or adventure or admiration or love we feel like getting the things we want will make us happy. The flip side of craving is aversion, where we feel like achieving separation from those things that are unpleasant will make us happy.
Volumes have been written about this and it's impossible to summarize well in a single post. But if it speaks to you there's a lot more to say about it.

This is the first post I've ever seen that's gotten twitter-style ratio'd. There are more comments than votes.
- Yeah, interesting, isn't it?

Have a good time and then die.

It has same meaning as summer breeze, or warm rays of sunshine. We make things to be more complicated than they really are. Enjoy experiences you are given, live thru pain, be a human. Existence is a weird, yup.

Understand that most of the answers you’re going to get on Lemmy are self righteous. “There is no meaning of life.” As if they can also know there isn’t. I encourage you to look at the philosophy of this question over the ages and how others have answered it. You won’t find many other thoughts on it here since they believe that if you can’t see it, it’s not true. We know so little in all of existence that it’s incredibly arrogant to think we can answer this with any certainty.

Why not?
There is no intrinsic meaning to life, we are a random chemical reaction that is really, really good at propagating itself, and we've evolved to be so good at pattern recognition that we psychologically need to see patterns like meaning where none exist.
My response to that state of affairs is that I get to define the point of life for myself. Some days the point is to advance human knowledge. Some days it's to protect people I care about. Some days it's smoking enough weed to make a cloud visible from space. None of those have to sound even remotely reasonable to you because they are things that I've seen as the point of my life at various points in the past. Yours can be different, but I bet if you spend some time analyzing your values and what you believe in as a person you can probably identify a few things you find important enough to consider the point of life, even if only temporarily

are we just amusing ourselves until death?
Yes. That's arguably neither a good nor bad thing; a life with a prescribed meaning or prescribed expectations would be scary in a different way.
There's been philosophers that got famous arguing it's actually great and we should be excited, even, but "your mileage may vary".
he 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?
There is a thing called quality-adjusted life years. To make decisions about certain things like transplants, and to measure the effectiveness of health policy, they absolutely will factor in how much time you'll get from treatment and how much it's worth living.
Nations like mine will also help you peace out gracefully.

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.

meaning comes from us

Philosophically, I think the pursuit of truth and the exercise of compassion are worthwhile endeavors.
But when that's too abstract, I remind myself that I have people who rely on me and benefit from my presence in their life. I work to make the world around me better than it was before, so that others can immediately, and in the future, can have better lives.

That's the beauty. Given that there is no goal, you are able to define your own.

This is a fun question to ponder, and you'll get a thousand different answers from a thousand different people.
I think the more important question (and much harder to find an answer for) is What's the meaning of the universe? Why does the universe exist? How was it created? Why was it created? What was before the universe was created? What comes after the universe?
And you can join those two questions together. Are the two related? Is the universe's purpose to create life? Is life's purpose to experience the universe? Would the universe exist if there was not life to experience it?
- Things exist outside of our observation, but they aren't interpreted until we see them.

The point is to have a bigger car than your neighbour!

Life is what you make of it. Which is why we are leftists, we'd like more people to be able to have lives that are actually fulfilling to them.

On a fundamental level there is absolutely no meaning to life, it happened randomly over great great spans of time.
On a human level the meaning of life is enjoying it to the best of your ability.

First of all.
Life has no inherent meaning; there is no grand plan or objective purpose to your life or any other persons.
Thus; what you choose has meaning is objectively meaningful (to you).
On a grander scale. As far as we know currently, we are the only example of advanced intelligence in the universe. We are almost certainly not; but we have no evidence at this stage. This is objectively meaningful; for humanity as a whole, if you choose to participate in ensuring the continuation of the only example of intelligence is totally up to you. As long as some people choose to continue the species intelligence continues in the universe.
- Good, different perspective. I like it

To laugh at the absurdity of it all.
And if you ask Vonnegut; to fart around.

The answer is that there's no one answer. Since people find it, since people make it, and some people don't think it exists. I'm that last one, just killing time until sweet oblivion finally claims me.

There's no point and the meaning you have to make yourself.
nihil novum sub sole

Optimistic Nihilism baby. Basically, if nothing we do matters in the long run, then live each day to be happy while helping to make others around you as comfortable as you can while we all take the ride.
https://youtu.be/MBRqu0YOH14