There is none. And that is incredibly liberating. Choose your own path and do what makes you feel good (without harming others).

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.

Yes! Do what you enjoy as long as it’s not harming others. Whatever that is

I work at a hospital and most of the patients there are definitely older than dirt people getting surgeries just to extend their life a few years or even months. Most of the time it is family members making those decisions because they don’t want or know how to say goodbye. We have had patients that effectively died, but the family insists on keeping their organs alive with machines in the hopes that they wake up.

As for the meaning of life? I think it is 100% to entertain ourselves until death. Even if there was a greater meaning created by some deity, we’re probably not able to understand it anymore than a donkey could understand calculus. I personally could never trust any human to tell me who or what god is and/or wants. And god has yet to reveal theirself to me…

For me, i like to look at Life like beeing on an adventure over time. The Goal is death, but that Goal is meaningless, as long as the journey to it was meaningless. The adventure itself could have been good, bad, regular or irregular, it does not matter. Experiencing those Things was the meaning to that adventure. As we had no choice, no say in being born, therefore starting this adventure involuntarily, we should Not try to move along the adventures voluntarily. Death will come involuntarily too, so there is no point in stopping it short (reducing the meaning of said adventure before our Goal is reached).

Idk if there is really a meaning. I think it’s all kinda chaos. So much of life is out of our control, and I think meaning is something people assign to themselves to gain a sense of control.

Try to be grateful for whatever you have, embrace the things you enjoy doing and maximize your time with other people that get you. When you find yourself doing something that you enjoy doing try to really be present in moment. Think about how you’re feeling and why you’re feeling that way. Even the way your body physically feels in that moment.

If you want to find an easy meaning or purpose try to remember even little waves can travel pretty far. Try to be kind and patient with others when they make mistakes, leave things a little better than they were when you found them, that kind of thing.

At a macro level, it’s the preservation of our species. On a micro level, it whatever makes you happy and doesn’t hurt others (because that would conflict with macro).

Lots of interesting answers here. I figured I’ll pitch in too.

IMHO there is no one true, universal meaning of life - just as there is no one meaning of any piece of art. I think the idea that everything around you must have a single meaning is a relatively modern one, which came from the requirements of efficient communication (which should indeed be precise and not open to interpretation).

As it stands, it is up to you to interpret the world around you and find different meanings for yourself, just as you should do with art. If you are struggling to start, consider those questions: What do you enjoy? What makes you happy? What do you think is “good”, even if it makes you sad or uncomfortable? All those things are your personal interpretations of meaning of life. Or go ahead and make up something else, I’m not your dad.

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?

As for this, I think when people realize the proximity of death and temporal nature of their life, they are much better at coming up with meanings. Maybe it is to see your partner or your children for a couple more years. Maybe it’s another couple of gaming sessions with your pals. Whatever it is, when you realize you don’t have much of it left, the importance of it typically rises dramatically from your perspective. If you’re struggling to visualize something so dramatic, imagine that your favourite food will be completely banned and criminalized in your country in couple weeks. Wouldn’t you want to enjoy it more before that happens?

You are asking as a mind alienated from its body. Your body has interests that are not your interests, and it uses suffering to bend you to advance its interests for it. We all exist in a state of conflict with our own biological inheritance.

Our bodies generate a mind to suffer on its behalf, because without awareness it isn’t really capable of suffering. That is the point of your existence as a mind. You exist to suffer on behalf of something that is not capable of suffering on its own, so that by your aversion to suffering, you will make choices that are in the interests of your body.

You have to decide whether to simply adopt the interests of your body, or whether to try to hold on to your own interests and make that the point of your life.

If you have a worldview that includes gods, spirits, fairies, the universe as an entity, etc., that worldview often also provides you with the “meaning” bit. It can be stifling, reassuring, motivating, or depressing, depending. That was me for a few decades. Without that set of beliefs there is no built-in meaning afaik. You can study the stars or atoms or human behavior or plants your whole life and those things will not reveal a purpose or meaning for you, the universe, or humanity.

In the absence (for me) of any built-in meaning or purpose, we make our own meanings. If your meaning is “nothing matters so fuck it,” that is the meaning you are choosing or accepting as some kind of default. Like many other people I choose meanings around happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number, as Spock (and probably some lesser figure) said. In this mechanistic universe we somehow came to be, and we can think and feel and understand and learn. That is almost unimaginably amazing to me. We are people, not just idk viruses grinding away. I choose a set of meanings that value people and their happiness. Life is miraculous and apparently rare. In that special group we, humans, are the most phenomenal thing we know of in the universe. I choose to value us.

There’s no meaning to life, because that implies intent for it existing. It just does. However, I think it does give us an imperative to try to do good with the life we have. We’re one of the few things in the universe that can experience pain and joy, and we should be trying to minimize the former and maximize the latter for the other beings capable of them.

Nothing happens if you do or don’t, but it does make everything better for everyone if you do, which includes yourself for the purely self motivated out there. Life isn’t a zero-sum game, so we should try to make it as nice as possible.

Life has no inherent meaning. It doesn’t need one. That doesn’t make it pointless either. These judgments are human constructs, not qualities of life itself.

But if someone needs a meaning in life:
The meaning of life is to give your life meaning.

Find it yourself. What feels important to you? What makes you unhappy? What makes you happy?

I tend to be on the empathetic side. I feel a lot of pain and desperation about the state of the world, and the way we humans treat one another so cruelly. That’s why I am trying to find my own way to contribute, so that life, for us and those who follow, becomes permanently better.

I’ve always preferred Wittgenstein’s distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. From that view, questions like ‘What is the meaning of life?’ don’t actually have an answer, because life itself lies outside language. It doesn’t need to be explained; it shows itself in the act of living. Trying to express it in words is already a kind of nonsense, because we’re asking language to do what only experience can. That’s why any attempt to describe it feels ‘mystical’ (not in a supernatural sense, but because it reveals something that cannot be captured by propositions). In this sense, the meaning of life is life itself; the ongoing activity of living.

I’m partial to the idea that we’re part of a larger organism. So essentially similar to cell parts but on a different scale. There’s something above that, but we are as likely to figure it out as cells are able to figure us out.

What to do with that? I have no idea. In lieu of objective facts, I guess it’s useful to pick the good instructions from religions – usually the ones that they all share are the ones that are worth adhering to. Do to others etc etc.

That’s the beauty. Given that there is no goal, you are able to define your own.