We spend our days bound by endless obligations. Yet, even with loneliness, failed relationships, and soul-draining work, people still manage to catch a glimpse of happiness. Why?
life’s like minecraft. you set your own goals and then you pursue them.
Also punching trees is a lot of fun.
the number of trees I’ve punched in life is more than zero.
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a game-o-sopher. when life gives you shitty loot, change the difficulty settings.
It’s the everyday drudgery, miseries and annoyances that make the good times worthwhile. Just like you never appreciate the sun more than in a place that gets very little of it.
I currently live in a country that enjoys a very high standard of living and where people really do enjoy the good life. Yet weirdly enough, a lot of the locals are depressed and keep complaining. Why? Because they don’t realize what they have, because it’s their everyday normal.
As for what’s the point of living, if you don’t want to fall into the easy fallacies of religion, I suggest you simply enjoy your life while you can. You were born with a finite number of hours on this dirtball and they’re ticking away, so make sure you spend as many as you can with your loved ones having a good time. Because when the clock stops ticking, it’s over.
It’s up to you to create your own purpose in life.
In my view, connection with others and the happiness and joy we can find in that is the reason for living.
It’s what makes the world so terrifying that there are so many broken people who just want to hurt and dominate others and have no care for depth of connection. Because they are wasting their lives on accumulation of power and are painfully obviously deeply sad and broken people.
Sam Altman has his own issues, but he’s dead-on when talking about someone like Elon Musk:
“Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. I feel for the guy,” Altman said. “I don’t think he’s, like, a happy person. I do feel for him.”
So find people, find connections with them, make your life about your connection with others. That’s my suggestion. Love is scary, but also freeing. Will that be a struggle with the obligations we face? Sure, but not impossible, especially if you do your best to set clear boundaries and focus on your family and friends as opposed to the soul crushing job you work to be able to take care of yourself.
One of my favorite films is Dead Man. It’s a “buddy movie” about the importance of friendship and the unlikely places we find it. Two men who have been rejected by their respective societies find friendship, trust, and kinship in each other. I think this may be worth a watch for you.
The chances that there this nothing waiting for us after death are laughably slim, especially as we make more discoveries about death and quantum phenomenon
Read into NDEs
Well, things do happen after you die, just not to you.
Compassion for those who come after us is one possible source of meaning.
One could also consider that having no afterlife makes this life more meaningful than it would be compared to an infinity.
Your body decomposes.
Well, that’s kinda the point.
If you assume that all we get is what we have while we’re alive, then that life becomes the point
A lot of people that reach the conclusions you have, opt out. They move into a commune, they go vagabond, they may choose to just flit between jobs and find whatever fun is in them.
Or, they may decide to become focused on finding purpose within the world that is, the societal structures as they exist. Some of those devote themselves to service, or find jobs that they believe make life better for others.
Some stay in the framework of things, but do the bare minimum and focus on their off time their purpose.
The point of it, from that point of view where this is all we get, is to find what makes staying alive worth it.
It isn’t like the certainty of no afterlife removes your ability to live and love and do good things. It can make it harder to bear the bad things of life as well, but that’s anything really.
The point is what you decide it is.
Well written!
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Time, and how you use it, becomes more important once you understand that it’s finite.
There’s no meaning, no purpose. We’re random life on a random planet. Try to have a happy life and try not to inhibit the happiness of others. That’s it.
There’s no meaning, no purpose.
… That you don’t provide yourself, and it could be anything.
it could be anything.
But you have to actually believe it. So the trick is to find your purpose, as much as it is to make it up. There’s something in you that wants to come out… or maybe not!
Anything?
Whatever’s important to you.
It’s important to me that I have no goal or purpose, and I will focus on making that come true no matter that.
I promise that I will die. Even if it takes the rest of my life!
The journey wasn’t taken from you just because there is no destination
Literally a theme in the video game Journey.
If nothing we do matters, the only thing that matters is what we do.
Life sucks, the world is a bad place. Leave it just a little bit better than you found it and you’ve lived life’s purpose in my book. We are generational garbage collectors, picking up the pieces of societal trash our forebearers left behind. So do your part. Pick up the trash. Leave the world just a little bit better than you found it.
Genuinely thanks for that first line. I’ve held that idea for a long time without the correct words for it to explain how I feel to other people.
I feel like it also compliments the philosophy of “why not?” As in, “if nothing we do matters, why not be kind? Why not love people? Why not help people present and future?” If good and evil are equal utility, why not be a good person?
There’s no point, and that’s beautiful. Go live your life the way you want to — nothing will happen after you die
the worst advice ever given to Ted Bundy
Or another way, the process is the point
Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s going to die. Come watch tv.
Morty?
But you are here now, so live a good life and enjoy it while you can. Maybe try to help others do the same. This is all we get, so use it to the fullest.
This. “It is a cheap generosity that promises the future as compensation for the present.”
Paraphrasing something I read somewhere “Do we open a book just to close it again?” That for me, it means that it is not merely for doing something that we exist, but to tell stories, to pass on knowledge, to keep rituals alive, to be a vessel for something beyond ourselves. The important part, same as books, is to tell stories. Everything sparks from there.
We’re all just stories in the end.
Life is the point, this one
Why do you need reward in a second life for the first one to matter?
Wait, there is nothing after second life? What is the point of second life without third life to give it meaning? /s
IIRC, the nihilist position is that there is no point, and the way I’ve chosen to interpret that is that it means we are free to personally define the point at any time, and for any length of time, as we please. The pointlessness lets us custom design life to fit our needs and desires, if we can minimize getting caught up in “you should do this and be that” external mentalities that may be incompatible with our natures. This seems like one of many correct paths to life satisfaction.
Of course, part of the battle is discovering what’s in your(you in general not you specifically) nature to do and be, and then having the courage to see it through no matter what influences around you are saying or doing that may contradict it. The other part being unlearning incompatible mindsets that may have been fed into your mind when you were younger; authority figures anywhere in, and in any stage of, life are in dangerous positions to cause long term harm to impressionable, trusting minds, which is why I personally focus more on the “figure” and less on the “authority” part of “authority figure” when I’m dealing with people in those positions.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it” - Aristotle or whoever actually said it.
Absurdism > Nihilism
You can either let the fact that nothing matters trap you, or you can allow it to free you.
From what i’ve observed, people deal with “there’s no higher power” differently.
For some people, that i call right-wing, or authoritarian, having some higher power that tells them what to do, is the meaning of life. If they lose that something, then they become depressed and stop living, in any sense, a joyful life.
On the other hand, there are people, which i am comfortable to call left-wing, or hippies, or communitarian, who don’t need that higher power to tell them what to do, in fact, it rather obstructs them. They are joyful even in the absence of a higher, guiding power, because they can find their own meaning in life.
IMO the need for a higher authority is both because of fear of death, and to be lazy and not think about what is right and wrong. So either excuse yourself (ex. catolicism, ask oardon from god not the victim) or just believe “your” religion gives you the right to do as you please.
So stop living in fear and embrace the absurd that we, simple 100 years tops organic blobs live in a billion years universe.
