I mean, there is no meaning in nature, it was man who invented it, and often it appeared because of a scarcity, for example, the point is in a beautiful woman, because you are unlikely to find another one as beautiful, right?, or can you find a person who will support you and accept you as you are, like your loved ones? The examples are not the best, but I hope you get the idea.
In addition, I will say that about a year ago I watched the film “The Seventh Seal”, and now sometimes I feel in the place of a character named Antonius Block. I dismissed the inevitable by refraining from suicide as a teenager, thinking I could find the meaning of life, but what was to be expected, nothing worked out. But especially now, how shall I put it… in the age of AI, it is impossible to escape the truth, self-deception no longer works, at least for me personally.
Chess Game with Death:
Corollary-- that doofus, cool-kid guy on the right is probably going to do something stoopid, likely to bust his own argument…
Well, there’s different degrees of “matters”. Obviously if he causes harm to himself or others there will be consequences that matter! This is specifically referring to anything intrinsically mattering on some sort of cosmic scale.
Hmm…
Please feel free to go on, Samus…Sir Pterry put it better than I ever could:
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
I guess this all kind of takes me back to when we arguably got too smart for our own good. That our intelligent fear of the unknown became so outsized that we started to try to bend nature to our own will, create gods & religion, becoming a race of headcases searching for ever more elaborate solutions to problems of our own making.
~12Kyrs or so we first jumped down that rabbit hole, and now the ground is rising up rapidly to show us how that all works in the end.
We tend to anthropomorphize everything and think that everything works like our minds do, including reality itself.
I really like that poem “Ozymandias”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The point of it is: no matter what kind of outsized impact you have on the world when you’re alive, eventually no trace of you will remain, and everything you ever were and everything you’ve ever done will be forgotten.
It’s a heavy, depressing message, but I find it to be oddly freeing. If nothing you do will matter in the very long run, then you’re free to do whatever you want. Maybe you decide that you don’t care about the people 25,000 years from now and focus instead on the people in your life right now. Maybe you make it your goal to make their lives better.
You could succumb to depression and fall into a pit of despair and heavy drug use… but if nothing matters, why not spend your time making other people’s lives better instead? It feels good to make other people feel good.
My mentality exactly. My legacy doesn’t really matter at the heat death of the universe. Take it day-by-day, dream, care about those you love, but know that literally nobody will care about your mistakes 40 quintillion years from now.
And can we not consider that each of us can so arrange his own particular life so as to make it meaningful to himself and to those he influences? And in that case does not all of life and all the Universe come to have meaning to him?
Surely it is those who find their own lives essentially meaningless who most strive to impose meaning on the Universe as a way of making up for the personal lack.
–Isaac Asimov, Knock Plastic!, 1989
I see a lot of responses mentioning optimistic /absurdistic nihilism, so I’d like to share the egg.
Fun fact: the author also wrote “The Martian”
I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.
Meaning is whatever you want it to be. You have the free will to create your own meaning in your life.
That being said, reading your post, I mean no disrespect, but please seek professional help. This goes beyond “finding your own meaning” and dives into “something is wrong”.
I agree with this.
The general surface level answer to your question is, we have the opportunity to invent our own meaning and purpose in life, and fulfill it the way we wish.
But the real response to your question is, please talk to a professional about this, you need help.
There is meaning in life. It’s what you make it. The meaning of life is to give life meaning.
I would like to reply with a meme, but I can’t find a suitable one. Although…
Bear Vs Man
The new Tekken looks good.
I think the problem is, is people trying to bring meaning to life in general while ignoring what purpose they could bring in their life. Every single life that’s been lived, has been tunneled through the eyes of just one life, per person. Some people’s scope via influence, has brought purpose and meaning to the lives of others. Other times, it comes down to what you do with yourself, that brings its own meaning.
And people are leaning on all sorts of things to bring some sort of meaning to their life. Religion is a large part, because everyone fears as to where they’ll go after death, they don’t truly know where they’re going or whether there is even an afterlife, so why not believe in a God or another deity that has all these versions of hells and heavens? It brings a level of comfort knowing that there is some purpose.
But still, I think people just miss the mark on finding purpose in the general sense of life, than focusing on finding their own purpose by making it as they go.
Subjects grant meanings, objects are assigned meaning. I create meaning for myself because I am a thinking agent, setting goals and tasks for myself to accomplish based on my own values and decisions. Just because an event ends doesn’t undermine it’s importance or meaning while it’s occurring.
And even if there could be some object or set of circumstances that assigns meaning, being assigned some universal or objective meaning would be oppressive, undermining my own subjective meanings to be replaced with some forced or necessary objective. Just because some of us have an intuitive desire to be assigned an objective meaning due to a desire for our lives to follow a narrative structure with closure like fiction doesn’t mean otherwise there is no meaning. If anything the meaning is more important if it comes from you and isn’t assigned to you.
“Here’s squire Jöns. He grins at Death, scoff at the Lord, laughs at himself, and leers at the girls. His world exists only for himself. Absurd to all, even to himself. Meaningless to heaven, and of no interest to hell.”
Sounds like you’re in the Pessimistic Nihilist stage, you just need to process things and then progress yourself to either Absurdist Nihilist or Optimistic Nihilist
Myth of Sisyphus is a great book if you want to lean into the absurdism
yeah imperialism provided cheap money to workers through high demand for human labor. that’s decreasing now, so workers go through the five stages of grief:
- denial (AI can never replace human workers)
- anger (it’s the billionaire’s / AI company’s fault)
- bargaining (we’re yet to see this step develop, my guess is tax reforms)
- depression
- acceptance
depression is actually a theme throughout the whole process, so not limited to the 4th step, that’s just where it’s most intense. at the end however is probably the nihilistic optimism stage.
You can make your own meaning, an act that is also inherently meaningless but often satisfying, or you can just relax and enjoy the things that are enjoyable.
I used to try and explain it in more detail, but I’ve failed to get the point across often enough that I wonder if it really can be explained. I think people just have to sit down and think about it until it snaps into focus for them.
To some degree, what is important, enjoyable, and satisfying to each of us is determined by something immutable, but if we apply ourselves many of us can examine, reason, and understand things to a degree that we have broad control over what we let matter to us.
Focusing on what we choose to let matter to us is key to living without meaning. But we must also embrace the other parts of life, because without them, the things we believe matter most would lose their meaning.
Without the contrast of suffering, we would struggle to understand joy. I think that’s the hardest thing to accept for most.
Optimistic nihilism is the way to go. We make our own meaning.
that’s easy for you to say. it’s just that a lot of people don’t have a gut feeling that tells them what to do. so, for many people, without an external leader of sorts, they fall back depressed and sit around all day, at least that’s what i’ve learned from observing the people around me.
i’d even go as far as to say that there’s a very strong correlation between being politically left/right and being able to find meaning in your own life from within, without an external leader/authority/religion telling you what to do.
I’m glad there isn’t a meaning to life. If there was a meaning, then I’d have to be doing that thing or be failing at existence. If no act matters, then I’m equally valid for doing my goofy nonsense as I am working hard or whatever.
My life has meaning. It has meaning for no other reason than I say it does, and no one gets to decide that for me. I do not purport to speak for your life, or the lives of those I care about, or my cat’s life, or my neighbors, the birds, trees, grass, germs, or any other living thing. I do not assign meaning to society, civilizations large or small, or things that have been built to benefit me. I can only speak for my life. And I say that my life has meaning. Nothing that has happened to me, nothing that has been said, done, built or destroyed, can take that meaning away from my life without my permission.
A life has no meaning in the same way that a blank piece of paper has no meaning. I give that piece of paper meaning by writing, sketching, coloring, folding, tearing…and perhaps ultimately destroying. Now that piece of paper has a unique history imprinted on it. It can be shared, displayed, hidden, or thrown away. But the whole reason I did anything to the paper at all was because it was meaningful in the moment for me to do so.
