music.

What is the meaning of a rainbow?

I like that

" What is the meaning of your life? "

Interesting question . When / if i get / am allowed to have one i'll let you know .

If I really have to break it down to one thing...

My wife.

Really ? There is a meaning to "all of this" ?

... i'm skeptical

How do you think the world would be different if Nikola Tesla had the same thought?

Isnt the meaning of life to re produce and work like ants building stuff.
If I was a God I'd do the same thing but with more catastrophic events

The question.. "what is the meaning of my life?" .. what IS life?!

Trust life. Be life.

i always rather liked alan watt's explanation of the meaning of life (so here goes my attempt to butcher it )

to me its rather like going to a group of musicians, and asking them what is the meaning of music...
its kind of an unanswerable question, in that it's asking the wrong question.

the meaning of gathering together, and plucking strings, vibrating reeds, or percussing stretched hides over echoic chambers IS the music. so it is, in a sense, asking what is the meaning in the meaning.

there is no set destination, in the same way that when you craft a song, you aren't intending for it to arrive at a certain note (Sometimes you might even end up in a different key or time signature than you intended).

so to ask what the end goal in music is, is kinda silly. because the end goal is the music.

so in a similar way, to ask the meaning of life is rather silly, because life is the meaning.

now this isn't to be conflated with a purpose in life, which... objectively there is none, but my purpose in life is to attempt to make existence more beautiful for those who come after me.

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ― Alan W.

Hey,

I think that the meaning of life depends on whether one believes in God or not. If you don't believe in God, then there can be no higher meaning at all, so stop searching right there. Our whole existence is just a coincidence after all. “The life is for living!” and “Life is what you make of it!” are the most probable answers in such situation.

However, if one believes in God, it becomes obvious that there must be a meaning to this whole thing we call life. We never consciously create stuff without a purpose and since people are created in the image of God, it's not logical to assume that God created us without a purpose. If I look at my own life, I see a clear correlation between the amount of work I put into something (the cause) and the results I expect to get from it (the effect). So, I can't imagine that God created humans (which must have been an enormously complex project) just for the sake of it, without a particular meaning, without some higher truth.

As a child, I have addressed my countless “why?”, “what?” and “how?” to my parents, expecting them to provide an adequate answer to me. Now, since I see God as my ultimate Father, I want to ask Him my ultimate “Why am I here?” question. Thus, the purpose of my life right now is to re-align with God, with his all-knowing wisdom, and get the answer from Him personally.

In conclusion, I might state that one who doesn't believe in God, tries to create a meaning of life or runs from the question all together, while a believer tries to find one.

Greetings!

Thanks for your response AstraLex, it's good to see some diversity of religious beliefs here. In my original post I said, "In an atheistic universe, it becomes not only our task to perform our duty, but to define it as well."

With this quote I was implying that in a theistic universe, it is only our task to perform our duty, as it would be defined by an ultimate being, like God in your case. Your idea of finding a meaning instead of creating one makes a lot of sense, but I'm sure that many atheists believe there is some kind of ultimate meaning or truth, which they have responsibility of finding as well.

As a child, I first wrestled with the extensional questions like this. Being exposed to a lot of new-age ideas, I heard a lot about the "I am" central to existence. I tried to figure out what is beyond or is somehow responsible / governing "I am" and at some point, decided that "Why not" was a good enough answer.

Since I haven't used psychedelics in several years (DMT doesn't count in this regard), I tend not to think about questions like this very often anymore because I can't. In a way, I have become less "conscious" and much more like a self-optimizing reactive machine.

I suppose my life now is defined by my pursuits. My utmost desire is understanding of physical systems, and by physical systems I mean everything from monolayer TMDCs to consciousness. I want to understand these systems so that I (we) can manipulate them and push their technological limits (technology here means everything from spintronics to music). Art to me is manipulation of the brain in novel ways which I think, ideally, follows from new understanding of mind (this can be subjective/psychedelic understanding).

To be more specific (because reality can be understood in many different ways), I'm looking for an understanding/model (perhaps merely a personal one) that completely encompasses physical reality (physics + consciousness) in the way that maximizes symmetry, where maximizing the symmetry of a model means reducing the amount of information needed to express it. This is like finding the optimal compression algorithm for our complete understanding. Practically speaking, I can't do this alone, and the best I should hope to accomplish is to help in this human-wide endeavor by dedicating my life to chipping away even a tiny fraction from the unknown.

"There are mysteries to the universe we were never meant to solve. But who we are and why we are here, are not among them. Those answers we carry inside."

- Optimus Prime




"The One is the Invisible Spirit.
It is not right to think of it as a God or as like God.
It is more than just God.

Nothing is above it.
Nothing rules it.
Since everything exists within it
It does not exist within anything.
Since it is not dependent on anything
It is eternal."

- The secret book of John : The inexpressible one



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4hs2BbuxhI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAryr1htkDM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idFHPcv6sSs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz6aY2S4zdY

If there is meaning at all in my life, it has yet to present itself. Hindsight tells me I am moving toward a direction, foresight tells me that direction is as illusory as a dancing and singing frog.

For me, the meaning of life is to live. Secondary to this is to be happy and help others be happy if I can.

Besides living, I am not sure there is any "meaning" behind it all. Life is a gift unto itself.

nope, no reason to.
no need for a reductionist view on such an open-ended topic.

Perhaps our lives do mean something, but it seems to me that only once we pass away could the meaning of our life be assessed. How can we know what our lives mean or meant while we're still in the process of living?