How do you find meaning in life?
How do you find meaning in life?
What do you keep living for? Is there a specific person, goal, or idea that you work for? Is there no meaning to life in your opinion?
Context: I've been reading Camus and Sartre, and thinking about how their ideas interact with hard determinism.
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When I was young, raised religious, there was an intense focus on finding purpose in life, almost as if there is no value to life itself without some end goal.
After leaving religion and superstition behind everything that is left is remarkable, fascinating, and beautiful. There's no need for life to have a purpose, a sunset doesn't need to clock in to work, a rock doesn't have an active role to perform but it's still fine for it to exist, us too.
I used to wish there was done grander purpose, but have you ever considered where that ends? Say you do have an ultimate purpose on earth, to collect all the smeeshmups, you do it and then what? Say your purpose is to be a good little Christian person and go to heaven, then what? Glorify some monkey with an anus for eternity because he agreed you did a good job? Yikes
Yeah "grand purpose" is almost exclusively for losers. Why is my current purpose not good enough? It reeks of snake oil upsell
I definitely don't buy into there being some big thing that everyone should be working for in their life, but I do think that it's good for humans to develop meaning and purpose on a personal level - we need some drive in life or everything is just arbitrary and you have no reason to for one option to be preferable over another, if truly there is nothing that matters.