If nothing happens after we die, what's the point of it all?
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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?
The point is whatever we choose for ourselves. Just because we eventually die doesn't mean living isn't worth it. I don't care that one day I'll eventually die, I enjoy living now.
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Well the further you go on, the more likely it is that you find there is no point in anything, we are but a phenomenon in the universe
But if you look closely you realise many have needs, many have desires, many want to enjoy company and experience many things, they feel a purpose in what they do
There is a cute plot point in my fav anime, Hunter x Hunter. While the main protagonist Gon has a goal, to find his own father that left him as a baby, his best friend Killia is initially pretty nihilistic. He told his feelings about this to Gon, and he replied that, until he finds his purpose, Killua's goal will just be to be at his side. So, basically, the friendship itself will be his purpose.
I think the general point is that our potential nihilism is part of our character. We were never supposed to live an individuals and be self-sufficient. Finding a purpose as individuals might not be a solvable problem! We might need another person to get that purpose.
So while "scientifically" we don't have a purpose, as life itself is a phenomenon and our consciousness is a happy accident of that phenomenon, some people feel a purpose, they feel they want something, and others could simply tag along and find purpose in helping others with theirs.
At least that's my answer so far 🤌
Good answer.
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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?
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.
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Afraid? No, I'm male.
Disgusted by so much backwards dullness? Totally.
Baffled by the amount of people believing in imaginary sky-daddies because they're too weak to handle reality on their own? All the time.
Weak? Dull? Peasant?
Give me a break.
In your "reality", your life holds as much value as that of a lump of dog excrement.
And you have the nerve to call people "weak".
No wonder, atheists never created any civilisation. After all, what's the meaning of life, when it is all a giant accident? -
I like laughing and having sex (which I definitely have a lot of all the time I swear)
Somehow I'm not able to believe it.
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Somehow I'm not able to believe it.
I fuck trust me
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Your single existence might be ephemeral, but humanity isn't, your community isn't, and possibly your family either
Individualism breaks that sense of purpose, and it teaches us that happiness is made by personal enjoyment of often exclusive activities
If we lose trust in our community or in humanity in general, if we imagine the next person to only care about themselves, basivally if we expect individualism from others, we lose hope of feeling a more community-oriented form of happiness! And unfortunately in many places that situation is expected, because people are often indeed individualistic
Your single existence might be ephemeral, but humanity isn’t, your community isn’t, and possibly your family either
It is though. Life has existed on this planet for just under 4 Billion years and in that time over 99% of all species to have ever come into existence have gone extinct.
Your community & family are no less ephemeral than the life you yourself live, but you won't get to see any of that.
If we lose trust in our community or in humanity in general
I never had a reason to trust them to begin with, tbh.
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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?
Existential crisis moment:
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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?
Something doesn't have to exist forever to have meaning, that seems like a holdover from utopic afterlife religious indoctrination.
We can enjoy a movie or a lunch knowing it will end, I can pursue meaning and find multiple purposes throughout a lifetime.
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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?
Why does there need to be a point?
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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?
To enjoy the chemical pleasures that life has to offer, in its fullest.
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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?
There is no point, you make it yourself. And plenty of people manage to catch a glimpse of happiness because there's plenty to be happy about.
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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.
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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?
There is no point, we don't exist for a reason, we're just a thing that happened in the universe by random chance.
That's not an inherently bad thing though, heck, the concept of "bad" isn't even "real", it's just an invention we came up with.
But I digress. We must find out own purpose and meaning in life, it won't be handed to us. Think of the journey as a fun ride with no rules, there are no gods, the universe doesn't judge you, you are unique and weird and amazing and can interact with the universe in ways no gigantic star or powerful black hole ever could.
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Weak? Dull? Peasant?
Give me a break.
In your "reality", your life holds as much value as that of a lump of dog excrement.
And you have the nerve to call people "weak".
No wonder, atheists never created any civilisation. After all, what's the meaning of life, when it is all a giant accident?Just for the sake of the thought you'd actually be willing to talk about this (which i highly doubt, as your nick already hints at):
YOU assume life has no meaning because it's an accident. Why does it even HAVE to have a meaning? Why can't it just be? So your brain can make "sense" of it all?
Also no one's life holds any intrinsic value at all. And only because you joined some cult and follow some abitrary rules (that the next cult of the same flavour does totally different, so who's "right" to begin with?) doesn't give your life value. To this planet you're as valuable as a leaf or said excrement. Which is, in fact, way more useful for nature than YOU are or ever will be.Weak? Yeah of course. How else would you call it when someone needs someone else to tell them what to think, do or believe? If that's not the weakest form someone could assume, then I have no idea what "weak" even is.
Also, I'm no atheist, but thanks for assuming
PS: I find it really funny, that you use the word "reality" while you also believe in tons of unproovable fairy-tales from times long gone. Even with a mythical creator of all and everything that actually cares about wether you (and millions of others) pray or abuse your wife correctly. Exactly what every omnipotent being would totally love to.
Anyhow, more than likely i'm wasting my time here. Luckily I have so much of it
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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?
Everything happens after you die. Who told you nothing does?
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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?
Enjoy the ride.
There is no point. The point is that you experienced life at all, the most rarest thing in this universe perhaps. Most people don’t even stop to think how amazing that is. Going outside and smelling fresh air, drinking water, laughing, crying.
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Your single existence might be ephemeral, but humanity isn’t, your community isn’t, and possibly your family either
It is though. Life has existed on this planet for just under 4 Billion years and in that time over 99% of all species to have ever come into existence have gone extinct.
Your community & family are no less ephemeral than the life you yourself live, but you won't get to see any of that.
If we lose trust in our community or in humanity in general
I never had a reason to trust them to begin with, tbh.
I never had a reason to trust them to begin with, tbh.
I'm not sure what the meaning of this statement is. As i see it, you have to trust your community at some point because as a child you're not self-suffucient on a basic level. You need care from your family, schooling from your community, and if you take higher studies you need institutions to invest in your potential (be it by public funding like in most European countries, or by a loan). And that is just on the first level. Secondarily, the school in your community needs institutions too, and your family needs a job from the community, which probably also rely on institutions. You rely on them, they rely on others, so you rely on those others too.
In order to do all of that, before you even really have real life choices, you have to trust your family, your community and your institutions (thus, your Country).
Once you start having a real choice on what to do, then I can accept you might lose trust even if still having to rely on some of these. And you can work in a job that has very little to do to your community. Which is close to the situation I am living, actually.
So you lost that trust that allowed you to grow up to adulthood, because now you have a choice and you don't like what you see. Which is fair, we are all caught up in individualism, we know that we need to have a way out of situations by ourselves. That's why money is so central in our life: if things go wrong in our community, we will need money to convince others to grant us services and goods to cover our needs.
But that has more to do with material needs, not with "purpose". Nothing really stops us from trusting our community for non-material things, such as a sense of purpose. We just decide not to do it out of habit of being individualistic.
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Just for the sake of the thought you'd actually be willing to talk about this (which i highly doubt, as your nick already hints at):
YOU assume life has no meaning because it's an accident. Why does it even HAVE to have a meaning? Why can't it just be? So your brain can make "sense" of it all?
Also no one's life holds any intrinsic value at all. And only because you joined some cult and follow some abitrary rules (that the next cult of the same flavour does totally different, so who's "right" to begin with?) doesn't give your life value. To this planet you're as valuable as a leaf or said excrement. Which is, in fact, way more useful for nature than YOU are or ever will be.Weak? Yeah of course. How else would you call it when someone needs someone else to tell them what to think, do or believe? If that's not the weakest form someone could assume, then I have no idea what "weak" even is.
Also, I'm no atheist, but thanks for assuming
PS: I find it really funny, that you use the word "reality" while you also believe in tons of unproovable fairy-tales from times long gone. Even with a mythical creator of all and everything that actually cares about wether you (and millions of others) pray or abuse your wife correctly. Exactly what every omnipotent being would totally love to.
Anyhow, more than likely i'm wasting my time here. Luckily I have so much of it
What a load of rubbish from someone who has read almost nothing about religion and is confused.
"Also no one’s life holds any intrinsic value at all."
So why do you care if someone is "weak" or follows a cult?"If that’s not the weakest form someone could assume, then I have no idea what “weak” even is."
You have no idea of anything.
Most likely, you had a traumatic childhood growing up in a religious household and have suicidal thoughts every now and then. For at then end of the day, in your "reality" you are the same as a lump of dog excrement. -
Just for the sake of the thought you'd actually be willing to talk about this (which i highly doubt, as your nick already hints at):
YOU assume life has no meaning because it's an accident. Why does it even HAVE to have a meaning? Why can't it just be? So your brain can make "sense" of it all?
Also no one's life holds any intrinsic value at all. And only because you joined some cult and follow some abitrary rules (that the next cult of the same flavour does totally different, so who's "right" to begin with?) doesn't give your life value. To this planet you're as valuable as a leaf or said excrement. Which is, in fact, way more useful for nature than YOU are or ever will be.Weak? Yeah of course. How else would you call it when someone needs someone else to tell them what to think, do or believe? If that's not the weakest form someone could assume, then I have no idea what "weak" even is.
Also, I'm no atheist, but thanks for assuming
PS: I find it really funny, that you use the word "reality" while you also believe in tons of unproovable fairy-tales from times long gone. Even with a mythical creator of all and everything that actually cares about wether you (and millions of others) pray or abuse your wife correctly. Exactly what every omnipotent being would totally love to.
Anyhow, more than likely i'm wasting my time here. Luckily I have so much of it
"YOU assume life has no meaning because it’s an accident. Why does it even HAVE to have a meaning? Why can’t it just be? So your brain can make “sense” of it all? "
Look at how much of an idiot you are. Everything we observe in nature nicely follows laws and have a clear design in it. This indicates the presence of an agent with the Will, Power and Knowledge to design.
If everything is "just be", then we wouldn't have indulged in any human enterprise like civilisation building or pursuing science. It's all a pursuit of finding meaning.
You claim everything is "just be" and have the audacity to accuse people searching for answers of being "weak"!!
You seem someone who thinks too highly of himself to realise his utter stupidity.
