Is there any meaning to life? or is it really just nothing?

Great Debates
21

The purpose of life is self-gratification. Selfishness, people! It’s the one rule! Seek personal pleasure, avoid personal pain; seek personal happiness, avoid personal unhappiness.

Fortunately for everybody, most people aren’t sociopaths, so they have emotional reactions to what happens to other people - if bad things happen to the people in their monkeysphere, it makes them themselves unhappy. So, in pirsuit of avoiding emotions like sympathetic misery or guilt (or shame, or the feeling of being run out of town on a rail), people act nice to other people - ‘atruistic’, even.

But it’s all powered at the bottom level by the desire for personal pleasure - nobody is altruistic who doesn’t derive some level of empathy or righteous superiority out of it, or who isn’t avoiding some worse guilt or pain. This isn’t a bad thing - it just shows that we’re wired in a way that is mutually beneficial for us and others. Of course, we’re also wired to like watching saturday morning cartoons - this too is the meaning of life, because the meaning of our lives is written in how our lives are effected by things. Avoid pain, seek pleasure; it’s programmed into our very being.

22

If I understand correctly, the belief that you’ve described is more like Existentialism (“that the individual is solely responsible for giving their own life meaning and for living that life passionately and sincerely”) than Nihilism.
As the existentialists have dominated this thread so far, I’d like to offer a dissenting view. I believe life *is meaningful. I believe in Good. I believe in God. I believe that we, and the world we live in, are more than just accidental phenomena that just happened to happen. (And part of the meaning of life involves finding out and living out what that meaning is.)

And, in a sort of variation on Pascal’s wager, I’d rather believe that life has meaning when it really doesn’t (what have I got to lose?) than vice versa.

23

Out of curiousity, am I an existentialist, or a hedonist, or what?

And, you sound like an existentialist too, with that last parenthetical comment at the end of the second comment. Plus, pascal’s wager has little meaning except to those who are choosing their own meanings.
I want to ask everyone in general, what is the definition of the term ‘meaning’ in this context? I’ve been using the definition ‘guiding purpose’, in which case it’s pretty obvious that avoiding pain is a serious contendender, since we are even instinctively guided to avoid pain to some degree. However I’m aware that the word has other meanings (heh), so if you’re thinking of something different than me, I’d like to know.

24

A fair point. But I think my parenthetical comment, and allusion to Pascal’s wager, is not (at least in my case) so much about choosing beliefs or meanings as it is about choosing to spend time and energy worrying about “What if I’m wrong about what I believe?”

25

Life is the power of Love, and connection to God, and His creation, we only experience a small part of ‘life’ on earth, and that ‘life’ is drained away by this world, but life is what we all desire, connection, Love, and with that power over death, disease, laws of physics, everything that this world seems to restrain us by is overcome with life, which is Love of God flowing through us. One day when the small reserve of Love/life is depleted, we will all seek God, it is a homing beacon IMHO.

Our life on earth, is really holding on to death and decay, our bodies are breaking down and will fail, and rot. What we assume is life is really extended death, not something to be desired or prolonged, but something to be overcome, transcended which is possible.

So as the OP, yes ‘life’ as we typically mean it as extended death is pretty meaningless, as one can read in Ecclesiastes from the OT, almost any chapter would do, it is entirely about the meaningless of ‘life’ as described in the OP.

26

I prefer to think of this experiment having proved that the server is faster than the network. You made the decision to pick the right ball it just took a micro second longer for your fast brain to tell your thoughtful brain and then for that to tell your hand which to reach for. Your unconcious mind is still your mind, it’s just doing the tasks you’ve designated as repetitive and not needing extensive consideration. Like breathing. In, out, in, out, in, out.

27

Surely an answer to a problem has come to you out of nowhere at some point. Do you consider yourself to have solved the problem or not? That is basically the same deal as the experiment you mentioned. You are the sum of your consciousness and subconsciousness, but the effectiveness of your subconscious mind depends strongly on how you’ve trained it, often consciously.

28

58, M.

I see your problem. In the long term, we’re all just going to degrade into protons, and nothing will have meaning. The meaning comes from the short and medium term. In the not too long term we’ll be dead - but that doesn’t limit meaning.

While what you do for yourself is finite, what you do for other people is nearly infinite, and can impact the world long after you are gone. At your age people have mostly done things for you, which is natural. When you get older, and start seeing your impact on others, things will look a lot rosier.

For instance, think of teachers who have influenced you. Did their life have meaning? Even more, your life will affect other people in ways you will never know. My first grade teacher was old when I had her, and is long gone, but her decision to ignore the official reading method and teach her class phonically had a gigantic impact on my life.

As for long term, no one but a historian knows more than a few dozen names from the Roman Empire and Roman Republic. But think about the people who taught Ovid or Pliny or Plutarch - or Julius Caesar. We no longer remember their names, but their life had a big impact on the world.

29

Unfortunately, many people don’t see the difference between happiness and pleasure. Self-interest is not the same as hedonism.

30

Thanks for posting your age. Next time I’ll request it in the Original Post.
I think overall, your right about my age affecting how i look at the world. I expect at this age all I want to do is be a grown and independent self serving man. After all, my words can only be backed by logic to a certain point. with no experience and nothing to show for myself I can make only claims to predictions or speculate on what things may be.

I imagine that at a certain age, when you’ve run through many options you could have thought through, it is inevitable to search for legacy. Some people may do it on a larger scale and some people on a smaller one. When all is said and done, you generation will die out anyway. There is no pleasure in surviving past the ones you know and love, I would imagine. To desire immortality, is to desire something we couldn’t comprehend if we wanted to.
In fact I think that the wonderful things in life are DRIVEN by the fact that we will die. Procreation. Love, sex. Achieving goals. Wanting success, or fame, or distinction, or whatever it is. The desire to have what you want from the moment you begin to leave your mother’s nest. What’s the point of acquiring, working hard, or achieving if you lived forever. You could do that later. I know there’s people out there who aren’t ambitious, but i figure that they’re the kind of people who pay no mind to the reaper above their heads

Death is the source from which ambition rears it human face.

Then, say you survive to 60. I can imagine being 60, about as well as I can imagine immortality.

At that point I would guess that searching for legacy would be the thing to do.
And I guess the answer is that life has no long term meaning, because to us, what happens while we’re alive has a lot of meaning. It makes no difference how someone we never met feels about how meaningful your life is. It matters how meaningful something is when YOU feel it. In the end the most meaningful things in life are the ones that make you feel the most. In fact you could say that the concept of MEANING was borne of the moments when people realized that certain things make them think and wonder and feel strong emotions.

I also wouldn’t mix up things that make you feel, as opposed to things that are socially accepted to make you feel, but generally they don’t.
I’ve heard somewhere, that people have little mercy or mortality for people not in their immediate environment. If you can’t see or hear them, it doesn’t allow you to sympathize with them. If you see suffering often times it will make you sad. You’d have to devote some to imaging what it must be like if you on hear about someone somewhere in someplace you don’t know anything about physically.

You know a death in the suburbs is a terrible thing for a person in the suburbs, where as aids in africa is just another one of those things on tv. which is mroe horrible?

31

“Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing!”

32

just keep dancing!!!

33

Not to throw another name at you, but this is a very good summation of 2 of the developmental stages in Erikson’s Eight Stages of Man. They’re huge on Erikson in my nursing program, and while I quibble with some of the details (that is, I think the general theory is sound, but the specifics of some of the stages reek more of a description of the 1950’s than a universal theory of human development), it’s still a useful tool.

If I have a 60 year old client who is focused on building his first career, that sets off some alarm bells. Most 60 years olds are (and “should be”, according to Erikson) concerned with legacy, with giving back wisdom, time or money to the younger generations.

Of course, reality messes with theory. Some 60 year olds are still working hard at building their own lives, looking for new romantic partners or other activities that they “should” be past by now. Such is life.

34

Here’s one version: What is the Monkeysphere?

35

The Hokey Pokey. That’s what it’s all about.

Seriously though, one of my favorite books ever was If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him by Sheldon Kopp.

Especially, the Escatological Laundry List found here: http://webdata2.soc.hawaii.edu/illumlife/abelist.htm

I particularly like #12:

“12. It is a random universe to which we bring meaning.”

I always go back and read that list when life is feeling stupid and uncomfortable. :slight_smile:

36

I think:
The meaning of life generally is just more life, by design.

The purpose with which you lead your own life can be what you make it. Ideally you try to maximize things you value for instinctively emotional reasons, primarily the desire to help others and alleviate suffering. I don’t see that it could have any more purpose than that, though that broad framework covers pretty much everything really worthwhile.

37

Actually I never searched for a legacy, it just came to me. I was visiting a professor friend of mine, and he commented that one of his students was using a paper I wrote as a grad student in his research. I was floored, because I had only considered the more or less immediate impact of my work.

You are right about immortality, but not for the reasons you give. You will outlive many people you love long before you are anywhere close to immortality. If you were immortal and healthy you could remember those gone and make more people friends and lovers in the present. My concern more is that we basically live in a golden age now. Reading history, I wonder about the luck of those living in the height of the Roman Empire, or when the Mayans were strong, versus those living when everything is falling apart. I wouldn’t want to press my luck. For the same reason, life after death would be dreadful. You’d either see the horror and not be able to do anything about it, or be changed so you don’t care, in which you wouldn’t be you.

Not me. Death has never driven me to do anything. I could no more goof off than run a mile in 2 minutes. When I have ideas, and I have a lot, I want to see them implemented. Now I am happy that I have managed to transmit some of my genes to the next generation (mostly the good ones, it turns out) but I mostly have always liked kids, and was glad to have some of my own to play with and warp.

Getting awards is nice, though. However, we all depend on the work of so many other people, work that many of them, especially younger ones, think came out of thin air. No one is going to say thanks each time something is mentioned, nor should they, but I can assure you just seeing a reference to some stuff I did for the good of my field is very rewarding. I added a brick or two to the tower we are building. Sure, being chief architect would be fun, but I’m pretty happy with my bricks. Just do things that help others, which is how you do the bricks, and you’ll see.

38

Well, so long as they’ve finally moved out of their parents’ basement, it should be okay.

Lots of stuff you do never quite has an impact. You have to throw lots of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

39

Well but what I can’t agree with, and believe me I’m having a hard time disagreeing with Voyager as it is, is that it couldn’t be possible that the prospect of death doesn’t shape who you are.
The fact that you die gives you the instinct to survive, which includes things like eating drinking, sleeping, shitting. You wouldn’t do anything of any human quality if you were simply immortal.

If you are going to die, you do what you can. One day you realize you’ve spent your youth considering only the immediate future. Well, it is isn’t the naivety of youth, but the drive to do things that makes you young and naive. After all said and done what have you really done. Well… you’ve done whatever you pretty much can feel good about. How much is that? Well, I’m satisfied with the response I get from those near and dear in my life and those that I’ve affected. That’s enough for me.

Let’s be honest. Not everyone lives a happy life. Maybe for some people in their 60s, what they’ve done is enough.
For other people it might be otherwise… So the decision you’ve made most of the time reflect your mortality, becuase to be mortal is to be human. You may not fear death but thats your way of dealing with the great questions of life. Some people fear death to a panic… does it drive them to do more? Most likely yes. I know its cliche but there are people who will grow older and try to take away the fire from the young. Why? Cause they don’t want ot be old? Sure… but mostly because they’re closer to death… what would someone with somethign WORTH staying for on the earth do for just twenty more years…

Easy for someone on the lower end of the chain to be satisfied with the little things.
But what would Donald trump do for just twenty more years… I’m not saying hes going to die in twenty years, I’m saying he’s going to be a very very powerful man falling into the inevitable deterioration of his body. It’s a condition that you cna ignore until you can’t ignore it. We all die. And as long as you’re happy and distracted and you have nice things to keep you going.

I’ll tell you what Donald trump would do for more time and youth. ANYTHING.
He’d sacrifice everybody’s first born child and drink their blood.

Now I’m not saying Donald Trump is an immoral baby eating monster. I’m not saying that I think all people are the same and everyone would do the same thing. But what would you do with power if you had it. The people who have it are often quoted saying its better than sex.

If you lead your life achieving and acquiring its one way a human being behaves when they are HIGHLY aware of their own mortality.

But the answers to questions people ask are individual and based on the way that person lives his/her life. I don’t think that you could say young people think about the immediate future. Maybe most of the time. But then you could say older people think only about the past and what they could do to make up for it.

We ARE making up for things when we consider that we didn’t think about the long term effect of our actions in the past. What do we do. Maybe we start talking to people that we haven;'t spoken to but deserve that from us. Maybe we spend more time with the family. Maybe we look for answers that satisfy our questions. Maybe we try to relax and enjoy life whatever is left of it. Who knows what we do, but it all revolves around the same thing.

If you didn’t have to die, you’d be young forever. In fact Long term impact would be the same thing for you at 80 as it would have been for you at 20.

for the span immortality 80 is a neonate. A friggin embryo. Life would be different
Maybe by the age of 250 we woudl realize that we spent our first 100 years being awed by the world and all its many colors. Much like we view children today.

Ever killed anyone? What makes anyone who has never taken a life think that they can decide what is important in life.

Most people use the length experience as their back. I say the quality of experience regardless of length is the key.

I know some really stupid old people. And it has nothing to do with their age. You know if your racist your whole life and you don’t open up to new ideas, and you still can count higher than the fingers on your hand…
Maybe that person’s view doesn’t count.

And then you’d have to judge every other person as a person. It’s not credible to be more experienced, but to have had more powerful and meaningful experiences.

Maybe the people who commit an act of murder are the ones that can really experience their mortality to the fullest. Maybe those people have more insight as to what life is than any of the rest of us ever will. I doubt they grow old and feel like everybody else. And i don’t mean people told to shoot a gun from a distance. I mean the ones who’ve killed and felt it. Who KNOWS what the hell that’s like. That’d change a thing or two about your priorities.
I have a friend who is about my age, early twenties. Who has been in and out of the hospital due to liver failure. The issue is that he needs a liver transplant every 7 years. So each time he goes, and that is IF he gets a donor, he is borrowing 7 more years of time. Now that guy doesn’t behave nearly the way anyone would imagine a 20 year old kids would. Most people say thing in wonder wow, he is such a mature boy bla bla bla bla bla lba lbal bla, he’s experienced so much…

What is logical about someone older making a claim like that. It’s discrediting to my friend when people are awed by how much his behavior resembles that of their peers. Someone who has that kind of relationship with mortality is out of these people’s league. In fact they won’t garner the experience necessary until they lie in their death bed and then survive that.

Then again we’re still just being a bunch of 1st world assmonkeys. What can we say about reality for some kid who grew up eating his on piss and shit to survive.
Let’s be seriuos. We put bandaids on our kids fingers… that tells you something about our reality. Maybe our reality is a misconception. Maybe being okay with the nice things you feel becuase of what you did is a silly concept meant for people who have it better. In fact I would go as far as to say that ANYTHING I’ve heard from anyone about life and death and what it means at different times is ignorant.

Mostly because I’ve heard all these things before. Does that make me experienced? I donno. Maybe experience means hearing it all before and being certain of what you’ve decided because you have the time span to justify your beliefs rather than any good evidence. Telling others what it means, in other words is patronizing and ill representative of people other than yourself. Maybe your convictions are all wrong. Maybe your justification is just something you came up with.

All things that we discuss are human constructs. And searching for a reason or meaning in life is useless. Whatever we decide to mean something means something. No, you do not MAKE your own meaning in life, that’s grandiosity and the product of a priveleged environment. But you do decide to do whatever the hell you want to do. If it makes you feel powerful feelings, then its meaningful to you. Death makes certain people feel powerful things. In that case death would give their life a purpose, like they will die oh no oh oh no, lets do as much as we can then while we still can.
Even the concept of importance is a construct that doesn’t exist. What does matter is that when we say there is no meaning we are contradicting ourselves. If we really believed that we would never talk about things or feel things. What we are looking for is a REASON to do things, to live. Is our reason to serve a purpose, have a meaningful life, be happy, or just consume things. It doesn’t matter. It is the way it is, and it’s unavoidable that we all our victims of our environment and our mortal and animal condition. Eat fuck shit sleep die. We do that no matter how conceptual we get. If someone breaks down our illusions we’ll cry like a baby too. Psychology is wonderful because of that. Anybody can be any kind of person at any time. But the things we all share in common is the question WHY? not the answers. Never the answers

40

By the way everyone should read the monkeysphere!! You’re all in it