This may be a very short or very long piece but we shall see. I have recently been contemplating by myself and with friends the purpose of life. The real point/question I think about is what is the point of living? Obviously we all pass away one way or another but as humans we are burdened with being sentient and having an "active" consciousness. Is the point of living to experience everything that will/wont take place between the time of your birth and the time of your death? Why do some people have the most horrible experiences that no man could wish upon another whereas others have lived with complete security and health their entire life. Or is the purpose of life to search for that purpose? This seems to be a bit pointless to me as its a loop/paradox. The uniqueness of each human also makes me think about how perhaps different people have complete and utter different views about the lives humans lead. One man does not think for one second in his life about the purpose of his life and what the answer to life itself is. But others actively search for that answer. Is it even possible to find that answer, and is the answer a single universal constant or is it just as unique to each person as each and every person is different already? DMT may be one way to find that answer but it may not work for everyone because of how different everyone's perception of existence is. How can any one person find the answer when they may be an infinite number of paths through life to find it? How can people who work for 40 hours in a week possibly explore these pathways and have any hope of finding it? There are people who will never have to work a day in their lives and there are people who dont even have the opportunity to work at all. What if death is the ultimate and final answer? What if, no matter what you do, no mater how hard you search, no matter how you live your life, the answer to existence and life is (Ironically) Revealed to you when death finally finds you. Is death the only purpose in life? how does everything in between your birth and your death matter? You might leave a legacy or have a profound effect on the entire earth or maybe just the people around you, but in reality time will render all of it fruitless and pointless. People like Bob Marley and Jerry Garcia are people I look at and I think that they might have found the answer to it all before having passed away. they effected so many people and seemed to narrow down (at the very least) what life meant to them and what journey they needed to make in order to find that answer, which was music and all that surrounds it. One can nly envy those who have passed as they with no doubt in my mind either no longer need to search for the answer as their consciousness has ceased to think or they have been presented with the answer and have finally found peace.

Thank you for your time.

Depends on from what vantage point you ask the question from - life to me is more than just physicality.

The purpose of the body is quite evident; to reproduce itself, and to produce waste products that fertilize the soil. It's that simple, and for a lot of people that is where the train of thought stops for them.

However, if we are more than just the body then the question becomes more difficult to answer and we now find ourselves in the realm of religion, philosophy, occultism, mysticism and so on. It becomes a lot more difficult to find a satisfactory answer, as history is evidence to. You can spend an entire life investigating just one of those fields of inquiry and still be no closer to finding a satisfactory answer.

There's no guarantees that death is the final answer either, no guarantee that we all end up in the same place if any. Death may liberate us from the body, but then we may become immersed in something else or a bardo perhaps.. still no closer to answering that question!

Could write a lot more, but I think I'll just leave it with this. The question, the answer, the seeker, it's all inside yourself. Know Thy Self.

Life might have no meaning. It took me years to except it! No one on the nexus is going to be able to answer your questions and if they do their probably freaking crazy. You're probably a intelligent person and that can be a curse. The key is to stay busy!

The human brain isn't capable of these questions. I believe we're in a simulation creating some kind of super artificial intelligence that will be God like. This super AI will create other simulations with talking monkey's that will ask the same questions. This will go on forever and ever until the end of time!

Please look at my signature quote. I feel that is the reason we are here.

Be yourself as only you can be. Live a good life. Be a good mother/father. Be a good friend. Help those who you feel you can help. Be kind to strangers. Forgive anyone who has wronged you. Forgive yourself for your own mistakes. Find a place in yourself where you can experience contentment and joy in anything and everything that you do.

The point of life is to live it. Watch as the years past. Watch your child grow and learn. Watch yourself grow and learn. Watch your parents grow old. It is all very beautiful!

I have experienced ego death with LSD, mushrooms, DMT and ayahuasca. In every instance I was grateful to have my life back upon return from these powerful experiences. The dead know one thing... It is better to be alive. The answer certainly can come from death. Missing a loved one who has passed away has always left me suddenly seeing how beautiful their life was. How they touched everyone with their presence. I missed my presence when my ego was shattered.

Elephants will each mourn at the passing of one of the heard members, visiting the dead member of their group, touching the corpse with their trunk briefly. You can see the emotion and feel the contemplation. I have seen this with deer and other animals. The animals live without questioning the reason why they live. They just live and when another member of their group passes away they mourn.

Give gratitude to your life. Give that same gratitude to all life. Go and do good things in this world. Be yourself with no apologies. You are unique and wonderful! We are all unique and wonderful! You will be missed very much when you die. You never know how far the ripples of your life travel.

Analysis of the brains of people taking part in game theory experiments show the greatest positive results when each person is "sharing" rather than taking selfishly. It would seem to go against evolution that person would sacrifice themselves for a stranger but it happens, outside of a war situation too. That this occurs more when an individual is brought up in an environment where to "do the right thing " is encouraged suggests to me that as social beings one purpose of our existence may be to love and care for each other. I feel our awareness of self can allow us to steer our lives in the best direction, although I struggle daily with many failings because I can perceive a future I try to move in a positive direction. I don't think we have free will as such but have free won't...but by looking to the future and having self knowledge I think I can move myself in the direction that is best for me, my family and wider society

If I may parse out “purpose of life” and “purpose of existence”....

Despite our brains’ complexity, the purpose of our lives is just like any other life: to survive in the best way possible. In cases of incredible people, they may serve to help us survive even better, per se. As to the purpose of our existence, well that becomes a subjective, personal purpose, which I think is where you’re headed. That we are even discussing this, shows that our existence has purpose. A guy like Richard Dawkins might say that this discussion, even if you parse out “objective life”, and “subjective existence” as I have, has no use when discussing the purpose of life in a biological sense.

I think there’s a lot in what you speak about death. It is an answer. It’s a difficult answer for many symbolically, and actually. Death is an existence where your self, can never experience. It’s an end to individuality. It’s an end to ego. The ability to know AND direct our own experience is an incredible phenomenon. Our ability to enhance our experience is rare (ie. I think a few animals may be able to do so for pleasure). A mundane death is evidence that we are a part of all things.

From dust to dust. We go back to the cosmic pool from whence we came, eventually. It may take awhile. There’s a guy that Joe Rogan (?) spoke about who said “I want to be buried in the shallowest of graves so that I may decompose and become a part of all things that much quicker”. A Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn once spoke of eating a grain of rice with such contemplation, that he saw the field and the rice farmer, the clouds, the rain, the earth, the sun, the forces of galactic accretion, etc. So much so, that he was taking a bite of the Universe with every grain. We are that. We are the massiveness of the Universe. We are the product of unimaginable time. We are the product of forces that could consume our planet in a microsecond, or create a star in the next. We are the product of forces that can show us our own reflection in the still water of a lake on a perfectly calm day. We are an incredible possibility of forces and matter. There is beauty in what we are a part of. Life. Death. The Universe. I would never want to stand outside of it. Because, if I could, I would long to be a part of it again.

My .02¢

Ever read Simulacra and Simulation?

As touched upon in some of the above responses, "life" is kind of a multifaceted thing. There are layers to experiential existence, and therefore many things enjoyable, hence worthwhile, on various levels. And vice versa as well, of course. Depending on where you are at in your adulthood, material wealth and building a family may not seem sustainable, may not even be possible. And yet to many, opting out of such things might not sound to them like any kind of life at all.. they might rather be dead than not be able to buy a house and build a business and a family of their own. So we invent things like wellfare and preP and prozac so that they can.

It comes down to whether a person is able to divine enough meaning in themselves to be ABLE to do anything. Without meaning there is no emotional stimuli, and without this there can't be any form of agency of any kind left to the individual to reasonably actualize it. This is where you begin to see nerosis like catatonia or schizophrenia emerge, or else the person succumbs to a dormant predisposition like addictive behavior or obsessive compulsion and other forms of self destructive patterning and they spiral out of sight.

Of course I wouldn't dare condemn these people, lest something else up on high decides to condemn ME and next thing I know my meager powers of sense and discernment evaporate and myself spiral out of control. Because existence is a cooperative affair and you aren't the wheel - we are.

I am a believer in many things and a prudent follower of others, but I am most significantly musically inclined and have almost always found there what I needed most when it was not available elsewhere. Inspiration, namely.

BENSON: Oh, but Commander!! Music is language. The language of the bodies in space. Have you never heard of Pythagoras? The harmony of the spheres? The language of numbers?...

Had the same quest for a long time, though the levels of skepticism have to stay at an extreme level, definitive and not subjective. It's a hard path, even when you get direct answers, you can't believe it unless you can somehow prove an experience or entity contact.. which so far I haven't seen any proof only lots of very real "to me" experiences.

Good luck, I have found it to be the most important question, and that... there may not be an answer to be found, but I am ok with that. I'd rather have nothing, than false truth. When I die I will get my answers anyway, so many believe it to be a waste of time. I think it is one of the things that has helped me gain more meaning and pushed me to look for the limits on this life.

<3 and good luck.

Lol

Life makes it's own meaning.