Is life meaningless?

I wrote about a page of stuff, and then deleted it all.

Have any of you struggled with the feeling that life is meaningless? How do you find meaning? Or how do you find happiness?

As of now, I am not enjoying any hobbies (uninspired as far as making films/music/qbasic games goes). My recreation lately has been smoking pot with my room mates and playing minecraft, but I'm not really getting anything out of that. It's more of an escape than anything else.

The only thing I feel truly happy doing is hanging out with my girlfriend or listening to music while I drive. And I think I've been in that boat for the past 2 years. Only difference was I listened to music all of the time and saw my girlfriend everyday.

Maybe I'm just depressed/chemically imbalanced, or maybe something in my life needs to change.

1st World Problems, I guess.

Yes.

I think meaning in life can be different from pleasure or feeling inspired/engaged/active. Meaning can mean responsibilities to other people but not necessarily personal fulfillment. I tend to think this kind of fulfillment needs to be cultured and trained with a focus. For me it helps to create music or be good at something and on the opposite side of that I enjoy the basic pleasures that have more to do with immediate tactile experience like sun, swimming, hiking and new places. Whatever we feel at any given moment is just a random blend of external and internal and it doesn't really "mean" anything in any bigger sense of the word and sorry to say nature doesn't give a fuck so we're either out of luck or we can do something to change our environment and ourselves.

I also find a sense of relief in that realization because it enables me to feel the pointlessness of life without guilt or pressure. I think learning your own mind and what stimulates you and influences you is a big step towards controlling more of what happens though. The best possible thing is to try something new I think. Some kind of challenge that is outside your comfort zone and that you feel naturally attracted to.

I am in the exact same boat as you, except I don't have a girlfriend and am really self destructive. i often think that if I had faith I would have an easier time coping with shit. Something I am always being an emo bitch about is having no direction in life. It would be a lot simpler if I could just convince myself that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan for me. Purpose is just something we create though, it's up to you what you make your purpose. I have a super tight family, as tight as a butthole, and I've realized lately that one of my "purposes" in life is keeping that family super butthole tight.

  On 10/4/2011 at 4:34 AM, underscore said:

I am in the exact same boat as you, except I don't have a girlfriend and am really self destructive. i often think that if I had faith I would have an easier time coping with shit. Something I am always being an emo bitch about is having no direction in life. It would be a lot simpler if I could just convince myself that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan for me. Purpose is just something we create though, it's up to you what you make your purpose. I have a super tight family, as tight as a butthole, and I've realized lately that one of my "purposes" in life is keeping that family super butthole tight.

I was in a shitty place when I didn't have a girl friend. I think the problem was less that I didn't have a girlfriend and more that I had no self-esteem. I don't have low self-esteem anymore, and looking back on it, I thought low self-esteem was the root of my lack of meaning. Obviously it wasn't.

I too have been thinking that if I had faith I'd be happier. Seems like they usually have something to turn to, especially that "everything happens for a reason" thing. Problem is, I think religion is bogus and I do not believe everything happens for a reason.

In regards to coax. I feel no happiness/fulfillment/meaning from responsibility. Also, the pointlessness of life is discouraging to me as well. I feel like if life is pointless, then why the hell do I need to get a job and make enough money in order to live? On the flipside, even if I didn't have to get a job. If I could just live without food/water/shelter, what would I do with that spare time?

I do find enjoyment from immediate tactile experiences, and that's a part of the current short-term plan I've developed for myself.

1) Stop smoking pot for a while. Or at least only smoke with my girlfriend/those I am close to and have a good activity planned. If I don't do anything active while high I get all introspective and then I think myself deeper into the rut I've been in.

2) Play a lot less minecraft for a while.

3) Find a list of parks in the area and explore them, since exploring forests/parks has always been enjoyable for me.

Doesn't solve my big picture meaninglessness though, or get rid of my long-term worries. Or give me people to talk to other than Minecraft chat or watmm or my girlfriend over Pidgin. I'm not clicking too well with my current housemates.

I go in and out of those ruts too. it's so easy to get down and stay down. being miserable and depressed is easy. but it's lazy. life means what you make it mean.

Life isn't meaningless. I know how it feels to just want to escape (you know I'm in minecraft a lot, so...) but you just have to find something that's productive that you like doing, even if it's not what you want ideally. Like, with me, my girlfriend and my best friend are out of town in college, and I don't have a job or school to occupy me right now, so I get pretty lonely and bored. In addition, I am just not able to make music I like lately, so I don't spend tons and tons of time on it, and I've been having a lot more trouble making my DJ sets than I used to have. So instead of working on those things, I've made a bunch of small projects for me to do involving electronics and handmade stuff, so that I can really feel like I've done something, and I don't have to struggle with my perfectionism as much. like, basically, I just do little projects that don't take much thinking that give me satisfaction, until I properly sort my life out.

idk if that's really going to help me in the long run, but it makes me happy

:sup:

yes.

get very busy (have kids, be an artist, politician, stressed office worker, terrorist, etc) so you don't have time to think about it.

  On 10/4/2011 at 4:52 AM, Murveman said:

In regards to coax. I feel no happiness/fulfillment/meaning from responsibility. Also, the pointlessness of life is discouraging to me as well. I feel like if life is pointless, then why the hell do I need to get a job and make enough money in order to live? On the flipside, even if I didn't have to get a job. If I could just live without food/water/shelter, what would I do with that spare time?

 

I do find enjoyment from immediate tactile experiences, and that's a part of the current short-term plan I've developed for myself.

1) Stop smoking pot for a while. Or at least only smoke with my girlfriend/those I am close to and have a good activity planned. If I don't do anything active while high I get all introspective and then I think myself deeper into the rut I've been in.

2) Play a lot less minecraft for a while.

3) Find a list of parks in the area and explore them, since exploring forests/parks has always been enjoyable for me.

 

Doesn't solve my big picture meaninglessness though, or get rid of my long-term worries. Or give me people to talk to other than Minecraft chat or watmm or my girlfriend over Pidgin. I'm not clicking too well with my current housemates.

Well I can't speak for everyone but it seems to me that there is no 'big picture'. A big picture could perhaps involve doing something important that affects a lot of people, but even then time will kill all meaning if it goes on long enough. I think a lot of meaning in daily life comes from setting goals and reaching them, but once the goals are completed one tends to feel empty again and novelty is needed time and time again. The nihilist in me also tells me that meaning is very sporadic and specific to current mood and subjective happiness rather than a long sustaining thing and as such the sense of meaninglessness can change even on that same day when you experience something new/great/awesome (I've had this before at least.)

Whenever life gets you down, Mr Murveman

and things seem hard or tough

and people are stupid, obnoxious or daft

and you feel that you've had quite enough,

just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving

revolving at nine-hundred miles an hour

it's orbiting at ninety miles a second

so it's reckoned

a sun that is the source of all our power

the sun and you and me

and all the stars that we can see

are moving at a million miles a day

in an outer spiral arm at forty-thousand miles an hour

of the galaxy we call the Milky Way.

Our galaxy itself

contains a hundred billion stars

it's a hundred thousand light years side to side, it bulges in the middle

sixteen-thousand light years thick

but out by us it's just three-thousand light years wide

we're thirty-thousand light years from galatic central point

we go round every two-hundred-million years

and our galaxy is only one of millions of billions in this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding

in all of the directions it can whiz

as fast as it can go

the speed of light you know

twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is

so remember when you're feeling very small and insecure

how amazingly unlikely is your birth

and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space

cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

life means being alive lol

  On 10/4/2011 at 4:29 AM, vasio said:

Yes.

the answer is so simple, lol

yes it actually is very simple, this fixation with meaning is nothing but a curse.

i was gonna make a monty python ref too

iunno you just sound depressed to me. exercise more and explore parks and stop smoking weed so much and if that doesnt help, see a shrink. it can help a lot.

Define meaning and you'll have your answer!

Here's something to listen to while you're thinking about it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUg7xl4kKUw

if life was meaningless, what difference would it make?

that's where im at.

Sometimes life is pointless but not meaningless.

Do you even understand what you're talking about when you ask if life is meaningless? What would have to be the case for life to be meaningful? I don't understand the question.

  On 10/4/2011 at 5:50 AM, Root5 said:

I don't understand the question.

In all seriousness, this is probably the best answer I have ever heard in regards to this question.

life is meaningless, but you can still enjoy it

There's a philosophy professor at the school where I got my ba who used to answer this question by saying "Meaning cannot be correctly attributed to life. It can only be correctly attributed to propositions." That's a nice way of refusing to interpret the question in an airy-fairy way that is, frankly, devoid of meaning.

EDIT: I seem to remember telling that to ET once, and the he went on some tirade about how much he hated me.

hard to believe this question is still being asked... life couldn't be any more meaningful. cheer up, the music's always playing...

  On 10/4/2011 at 5:24 AM, Glunk said:

life means being alive lol

lol

Honestly, I think the question can't be answered since we have yet to accurately define life itself.

would a non-human attempt to answer this question?