I looked into a forum post recently, unrelated to osu!. I wanted to answer a looming question that has been around for months now: the purpose of our existence, of life. Well, it's nothing.

I found out that people make up their own meanings to fulfill themselves, to continue living. But I don't think I really have a meaning myself.. hence the question. So, for you, what is your meaning of being here? Even if you don't think you have one, what motivates you?

I want to learn further about this, to see how I can apply the answers to myself.

Cant wait to see what people say omg...

for me its all the small things!!! For a majority of my life I've struggled with depression and struggled with finding a meaning in life. I always thought your reason for living had to be something big, or for someone else... but then I started to heal and began appreciating all the small things in my life. Like the way the flowers looked on my walk to school, the yummy taste of pizza, how soft and nice my bed feels- just all these things I didn't put enough notice and appreciation to before.

so to me, I think the meaning of life is simply to exist, experience, and feel. there's lots of bad in the world but if you REALLY look around and take things in, there's a lot more good!!!

Patatitta wrote:

I guide myself by this

I thought of the same thing, also Life of Brian.

lots and lots of sex and Linux troubleshooting




In all seriousness, I am one to believe that the biological meaning of life, which is to make a fuck ton of kids, goes hand in hand with the one we, personally, make for ourselves. I personally want to help people as much as possible when it comes to the things that I find enjoyable, i.e games and computers/computing in general, as well as emotionally, whenever I can.

Winnyace wrote:

I personally want to help people as much as possible when it comes to the things that I find enjoyable, i.e games and computers/computing in general, as well as emotionally, whenever I can.

actually super sympathetic, i wish you well there, i hope you'll find what you hope to learn of these things

vNoke wrote:

Cant wait to see what people say omg...

for me its all the small things!!! For a majority of my life I've struggled with depression and struggled with finding a meaning in life. I always thought your reason for living had to be something big, or for someone else... but then I started to heal and began appreciating all the small things in my life. Like the way the flowers looked on my walk to school, the yummy taste of pizza, how soft and nice my bed feels- just all these things I didn't put enough notice and appreciation to before.

so to me, I think the meaning of life is simply to exist, experience, and feel. there's lots of bad in the world but if you REALLY look around and take things in, there's a lot more good!!!

also, this is really sweet <3 i hope youll grow to nourish what you want through this

...

ot: i dont actually have an articulate answer to this...

i dont particularly want to prescribe or describe my experience of life or other lives with a pre-deterministic "purpose" of my own... but i probably do it subconsciously anyway, not that i really know

if i was asked seven years ago, i would've had some form of "nihilist-absurdist" response, but not i'm not really sure i have a descriptor i consciously adopt. it's like, these things mean different things to different people... and the colloquial understanding of a descriptor is increasingly lacking

maybe i'm some form of... humanistic pseudo-hedonistic maybe-existentialist-absurdist phantom of idealized notions of altruism and eusociality? i'm some kind of product of particularly vague intersections of sociocultural phenomena over the modern-day internet, with a heavy dose of alienation and isolation... and a lot of yearning, a very vast lot of yearning...

i love to be a drifting hazy ghost,
i love to be a sponge of mimicry,
i love to be a camera network,

i love to be expressive if i can manage it. i think i just really wish i could escape the dull flat affect of living without the sensitivity to ground myself and my body to a life i'd never wanted to own anyway. i seem to love melodrama, i savor the logic of irrationality, i love a little bit of a ludonarrative in life. my ludophilia has very shallow depths, and very cowardly limits. i do not appreciate a ludonarrative at a person's expense, i do not appreciate a ludonarrative at the disaffected minimization of humanity. i am a coward, after all, and i am weak-willed and weak-bodied... and in a sense, through identifying with minimization, i find a certain warmth in that gentle frigid haze of failure, sheltered by tenuous circumstance

i love people without loving people. i don't feel it reliably but i think it into existence anyway. i treasure anything i can capture about people. about you...

you are not exempt... or maybe you are, because i am an inattentive and imperceptive fool, a puddle of idealized voyeuristically-creative impressionism

life is everywhere else. life is everyone/everything and what everyone/everything thinks and sees and feels. i want to see and feel what you see and feel. what do you think? why are you like that? how could you do that to us? what have we ever done to be your object of ridicule? i think about you anyway, not the real you but the blurry idea of you behind your screens and words, the you underneath your decisions made in the continuity of consequence...

i forgot what i was thinking about

To be able to create something

I enjoy the constant process of learning new things in art and design specifically architectural work (not on the technical side like engineering), digital drawing, 3d modelling, technical drawing, graphic design, and likely more in the future. The enjoyment of creation brings me sense of purpose in life that I would continue till I can't no more

Nanofranne wrote:

To be able to create something

I enjoy the constant process of learning new things in art and design specifically architectural work (not on the technical side like engineering), digital drawing, 3d modelling, technical drawing, graphic design, and likely more in the future. The enjoyment of creation brings me sense of purpose in life that I would continue till I can't no more

so real. this is meaningful, and it's wonderful to hear it.

good question

vNoke wrote:

Cant wait to see what people say omg...

for me its all the small things!!! For a majority of my life I've struggled with depression and struggled with finding a meaning in life. I always thought your reason for living had to be something big, or for someone else... but then I started to heal and began appreciating all the small things in my life. Like the way the flowers looked on my walk to school, the yummy taste of pizza, how soft and nice my bed feels- just all these things I didn't put enough notice and appreciation to before.

so to me, I think the meaning of life is simply to exist, experience, and feel. there's lots of bad in the world but if you REALLY look around and take things in, there's a lot more good!!!

You see, I could understand this at a baseline. But my problem is that I start to question even more than previously. The small things, what exactly does it amount to? Are we really here just to enjoy? Why? Sure, I can enjoy everything that you mentioned, but at the end, there is no purpose. Maybe I am not as thoughtful or positive(?), I don't know.

Patatitta wrote:

I guide myself by this

Yes, life is meaningless. Though, we've been hardwired to keep staying on this earth, how strange.

Winnyace wrote:

In all seriousness, I am one to believe that the biological meaning of life, which is to make a fuck ton of kids, goes hand in hand with the one we, personally, make for ourselves. I personally want to help people as much as possible when it comes to the things that I find enjoyable, i.e games and computers/computing in general, as well as emotionally, whenever I can.

I have thought about the future a lot for sure. I think about it because I am different from my whole family basically. I do have a desire to make a change in the family bloodline in the future, but even then, that doesn't feel like enough to push me. I have a lot of conflict with this subject, so maybe I should seek help for that in general.

Achromalia wrote:

i dont actually have an articulate answer to this...

i dont particularly want to prescribe or describe my experience of life or other lives with a pre-deterministic "purpose" of my own... but i probably do it subconsciously anyway, not that i really know

if i was asked seven years ago, i would've had some form of "nihilist-absurdist" response, but not i'm not really sure i have a descriptor i consciously adopt. it's like, these things mean different things to different people... and the colloquial understanding of a descriptor is increasingly lacking

maybe i'm some form of... humanistic pseudo-hedonistic maybe-existentialist-absurdist phantom of idealized notions of altruism and eusociality? i'm some kind of product of particularly vague intersections of sociocultural phenomena over the modern-day internet, with a heavy dose of alienation and isolation... and a lot of yearning, a very vast lot of yearning...

i love to be a drifting hazy ghost,
i love to be a sponge of mimicry,
i love to be a camera network,

i love to be expressive if i can manage it. i think i just really wish i could escape the dull flat affect of living without the sensitivity to ground myself and my body to a life i'd never wanted to own anyway. i seem to love melodrama, i savor the logic of irrationality, i love a little bit of a ludonarrative in life. my ludophilia has very shallow depths, and very cowardly limits. i do not appreciate a ludonarrative at a person's expense, i do not appreciate a ludonarrative at the disaffected minimization of humanity. i am a coward, after all, and i am weak-willed and weak-bodied... and in a sense, through identifying with minimization, i find a certain warmth in that gentle frigid haze of failure, sheltered by tenuous circumstance

i love people without loving people. i don't feel it reliably but i think it into existence anyway. i treasure anything i can capture about people. about you...

you are not exempt... or maybe you are, because i am an inattentive and imperceptive fool, a puddle of idealized voyeuristically-creative impressionism

life is everywhere else. life is everyone/everything and what everyone/everything thinks and sees and feels. i want to see and feel what you see and feel. what do you think? why are you like that? how could you do that to us? what have we ever done to be your object of ridicule? i think about you anyway, not the real you but the blurry idea of you behind your screens and words, the you underneath your decisions made in the continuity of consequence...

i forgot what i was thinking about

Interesting approach, to say the least. I am not sure if this would be the step to it, but learning the background of people does fall into experience in a way. Though, the motivation towards it? I am not sure where the aim is. Is it to just value the earth as a whole?

Nanofranne wrote:

To be able to create something

I enjoy the constant process of learning new things in art and design specifically architectural work (not on the technical side like engineering), digital drawing, 3d modelling, technical drawing, graphic design, and likely more in the future. The enjoyment of creation brings me sense of purpose in life that I would continue till I can't no more

I had this motivation before. However, I somehow back peddled on it. I am not sure why that is honestly.

I will take these and future answers, if any, to account. After more thinking on the responses, my answer results to valuing the world around us more, at least from my own perception. Personally, I just feel like I am living to live, nothing more. This question only came up because of that and how I approach motivation. I realize I don't have that much motivation at all. I don't have a sense of care or worry at times, and sometimes, that actually scares me.
So, I am hoping that this is the right approach, to learn off different people. I may question it, but I don't mean to butcher what other people feel.

Life makes no sense and has no meaning, but I think we were programmed to continue living due to natural selection, since those who wanted to continue living probably had more chances to continue living. Those who didn't care much about it were eliminated by natural selection... Idk, I don't understand much about it.

Behrauder wrote:

Life makes no sense and has no meaning, but I think we were programmed to continue living due to natural selection, since those who wanted to continue living probably had more chances to continue living. Those who didn't care much about it were eliminated by natural selection... Idk, I don't understand much about it.

Yes, that's exactly it. I can only wonder the why behind it.

life itself has no meaning but that leaves any meaning free of be explored

i think the meaning of life is to be happy. sure, alot of people aren't, but it's okay. they'll find their happiness someday too. like for me, being with my family, friends, having those who care about me and my interests, and caring for those around me and talking about their interests with them is what i think life is. i don't really have much else to say than that :/

it's a bit difficult to parse what we've been meaning to say, because what you read from how they/i communicate tends to signify different things and be absorbed/conceived/received by you in different conditions. in a sense, our attempts at describing our experiences with anything approximating some kind of motive for life... moreso is an explicit product of implicit continuities.

i'm a very extremely digital person now, so my idea of "sponge of mimicry"/"camera network" is influenced very heavily by my loose awareness and subsistence on my particular surroundings of subcultural fields. i think with more precision, i think i crave some particular things that "motivate" (i'll revisit that later) me to live:

+ learning of the interiority of humanity despite our experiential exclusivity from one another. i'm starved of experiences i've never had, experiences i lovingly envy, comforts i fundamentally cannot possess and be acquainted with by way of the conditions of my birth and being. childhoods that don't exist. adulthoods that don't exist. being a student and being filled with the joy of new knowledge and new skills and new creations, as means to the ends of the people we love or perhaps as ends themselves. being a mentor to someone and seeing them grow old and wise along with you. being cared for by (caring for) your bestest friend from childhood to adulthood and being inseparable and mutually nurturing and supportive.

+ creating my own fiction to approximate and reflect these things for people. creating something that can effectively and accurately mirror what life is to people, representing the distinct depth of sociological phenomena we experience today in the hope that what i believe i've learned might happen to shelter and nourish someone that deeply desired to be understood and found. at the same time, nourishing those who want to not be found, letting them live in their abstractions and creations away from the overwhelming sea of conditions beyond them. and much, much more.

i have extremely... idealistic? impractical? kind of narcissistically grandiose concepts of what it is i want to do. i want to perfect it, but it's just not as plausible as i'd hope. there are too many people, too many experiences.

but somehow i still come back, desperate and pleading and whining, hungry to gorge on humanity and envelop it, i can't let go even if i can't process or understand it all. and so i live in my own fiction, my own phantasms.

i can't particularly speak to how that appears or functions for you, or how that would ever be accessible.

...

i don't know what my aim is either, exactly. i think i just never really believed i had to have one after realizing how pointless i felt it was for me to fixate on pointlessness. presumably, i aim for "heal everyone", or more elaborately, "bridge everyone's perspectives like a camera network full of mirrors for people to see themselves and play with the angles and be able to visualize what they do and what other people do, so that they may understand and negotiate with each other, keeping themselves and each other together", or something like that.

...on what it is to "motivate" yourself...

...i don't know. i'm not sure i'm "motivated" either, i exist largely because it is easy for me in my circumstances to sit up and slink into a chair and type on keys for things i want to see in order to stimulate my brain. i love to make art, i love to make music, but i rarely make them-- because i'm tired, eternally eternally tired. it doesn't ever end, and my rumination makes it heavier, but i love it anyway somehow. this all has existed with costs.

this neglect has costed me my health, my sanity, and my sense of attachment to the material world around me.
but i'm still real, still breathing, still here.
i try to do what i can.

i forgot what else i had in mind;; i apologize, this actually means a lot to hear about and the subject means a lot to me as being something for me to talk about

If life has no meaning, then there is no point in finding one for yourself either.

If you have no meaning, revel in the fact that you are capable of happiness despite of it.

For my whole life ive enjoyed a lot the idea of nihilism and it gave me a lot of comfort but im maturing a bit, what is my aproach to life now? still a bit hard to say but ive had my social awakening and im discovering what truly makes me happy. Whatever that happened to me this summer felt like i was truly living

Patatitta wrote:

Also epic zorman moment

When it comes to life, this is a test for if you live. You only live one, but one can die twice.

The meaning of life, if you want to pick my brain about it, is the idea that what you do is seen by a higher power. Said higher power watches what you do, though it knows what you will do, and won't stop you from doing so as a result of free will. However, if you want to please said higher power, then it'd love that... as long as you do what it says a majority of the time.

One way to go about this is self-sufficiency. Learn how others lived back in the day, and use that knowledge passed down for centuries to do it. Learn how to, essentially, be a homesteader, for the higher power I have a distant relationship with was and is one.

Another way is showing what you believe by your actions. Words alone mean nothing, but words and actions are a powerful combination. If used right, you can lead people in a direction the higher power desires for them to go. I do that myself sometimes, but it's rare that I get anyone to see what I do, and see me as a mentor or role model, though I do strive for that based upon what I do.

sometimes i want to write a love letter to whatever reason I get to experience 'life' even if it is meaningless

i personally am sticking around for any potential alien meetings because they might have a better idea?

its basically just to live and do whatever you want, life is a bit like a sandbox game innit?

sametdze wrote:

its basically just to live and do whatever you want, life is a bit like a sandbox game innit?

a sandbox game inside a sandbox game inside a sandbox game

why would you need a meaning of life though, such questions would never be asked by any other animal. people can surely exist without any “meaning” and it’s no more than being normal as everyone else

if you find some way you’d dedicate your life to, it’s not “meaning of life”, it’s hobby, interest, and personal preference

we exist as a part of an ongoing googolplex of chemical reactions, our choice being how our body contributes to this

not to say "there is no meaning of life", but rather "fuck the meaning of life, it's a dumb philosophical concept that'll just walk you in pointless circles"

or alternatively if that doesn't cut it for you: the meaning of life is to be

To do what i want

The only meaning is the one you give yourself on a day to day basis

When i wanna eat a sandwich that is my meaning of life for a while until i finish, then it is the next thing i do