A lot of people look for the meaning of life itself, and from my point of observation it often falls into the few categories of "Serve God," "You give your own life meaning," and "There is no meaning." I'm not sure which is the best, most accurate, or most truthful, but I'll give my view of it here.
I fall into a sort of "You give your own life meaning" combined with "There is no meaning of life," largely due to my neutral view of the truth of religion. (If I knew God existed, I would say serving God is most important.) The reason I combine those two answers to the meaning of life, despite them being somewhat contradictory, is because of the way the question can be worded. I'll explain both.
First, the meaning of life itself? Well heck, I don't think life objectively exists for some divine, supreme purpose -- or if we are here for some divine purpose, I have no idea of finding out what it is. As far as I can see, life is just... here. There's no meaning to why plants grow, to why humans reproduce, to why we seek to find more life in space. Given a few million years, the Earth will likely be consumed by the sun entirely and every single living organism on it will be simply gone without a single trace of it. And when you pull your eyes even farther back away from the solar system, we're really rather insignificant. Inside the tiny portion of the universe we can see, we inhabit a supercluster. Inside of this insanely massively huge supercluster, there are multiple clusters of galaxies and nebulae. Inside one of those thousands of galaxies is a galaxy with a set of solar systems. Inside one of those solar systems is a planet that contains living organisms. Those living organisms live for, on average, under a century.
The Earth itself is tens of millions of centuries old. And the Earth could only have been made after the sun was settled, and the sun was made after the universe was made, and there could easily have been universes before our universe.
So yeah, in the whole cosmos of everything, the ramblings and internal thoughts of a single organism is rather insignificant and I feel there isn't any inherent meaning to life itself. However, your meaning in life is an entirely different question.
A meaning in life is a subjective reason someone has to continue living, and also to live happily. It's a drive or motivation that's similar in feeling to each person, but fueled by a unique set of desires. Maybe it's to have your parents be proud of you, or maybe it's to serve God, or maybe it's to spread wisdom, or maybe it's something simpler like graduate law school -- basically, a meaning can be anything whether it's harmful or fulfilling. At any rate, all of those desire-fuels burn the fire of motivation, leading us in the pursuit of happiness. It's this pursuit of happiness that everyone is currently engaged in -- either that, or the pursuit of immediate survival.
So I believe in a meaning in one person's life, but as for a meaning to life itself... that's harder to delve into, and in the end I can only say that I don't know. Further, a more important yet difficult question arises in my mind: What would be a good meaning for one's life? What would be a meaning that fulfills one's life? What meanings would sate one's desire to be happy without really causing any fulfillment?
The thought intrigues me, and I will explore it in part 2. At any rate, this is the end of part 1. :)
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