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?
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’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.
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.
Life has the meaning you choose to give it.
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”… 😉
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Hedonic threadmill: it’s the theory 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, through 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.
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 not let the sliver of it that I’ll interact with throughout my life, be a good 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”
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, have better lives.
The meaning of life is to give life meaning
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.
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.
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.
