Meaning of life

General Philosophy
1

The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life is not something we are owed. It is not a hidden truth concealed beyond the limits of understanding, nor a reward waiting for those who search long enough. Meaning is something we arrive at ourselves — through decisions, through creation, through every choice we make, conscious or not.
A universal meaning does not exist. The world was not given one — and that is not a tragedy, it is simply a fact. Yet within this world, its own quiet order pulses on: every action carries a purpose, every living thing a role in the endless cycle of existence. A tree grows. Fire burns. Not good, not evil — just so.
Meaning exists on different levels at once. There is a background meaning — in the bare fact of existing, in breathing, in moving through the world. And there is personal meaning — the kind a person builds through their own choices and actions. Some live for legacy, some for love, some for gold. For each of them, that is real. There is no perfect meaning. But there is yours — and that is enough.
Those who seek meaning in metaphysical transcendence, in something fundamentally beyond human reach — are destined to find nothing. You cannot find what lies outside the boundaries of what you are.
But what do you do when it seems like there is no meaning at all? Then remember something simple: you breathe. You move. You exist. There is already meaning in that — quiet, unheroic, but real.
My meaning is to leave a mark. To not disappear nameless. To write stories, build characters, create worlds — and pour into them my understanding of life, so that it lives on beyond me. Legacy is not fame after death. It is a living thought, passing from one person to another. An immortality available to anyone.
We are the authors of our own meaning. There is no other way.

1 Like
2

Greetings and welcome.

You seem very certain of this, and yet it is more a declaration than a philosophical argument. Large swathes of what was traditionally conceived of as philosophy are condemned to the wastebasket. And notice the very last statement: ‘there is no other way’.

Not a good conversation starter.

1 Like
3

You’re right about one thing: “There is no other way” is a closed-ended phrase, and it contradicts the spirit of the text itself. I admit that.
But the rest isn’t just a statement. It’s a position built on specific logic:
If meaning is universal and exists outside of humanity—show me where it is. Not in the text of an ancient book, not in someone’s interpretation—but in and of itself. No one has found it. And not because they didn’t look hard enough, but because there is nowhere to look.
Metaphysical transcendence as a source of meaning is not a philosophical argument; it is a belief. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s unprovable. And what is unprovable cannot be the basis of meaning for everyone.
That is precisely why meaning is personal. Not because I want it to be—but because the alternative requires proof that doesn’t exist.

4

As existentialists have been saying, we’re condemned to be free and that existence precedes essence. There is no grand meaning but we are to find our own personally satisfying one.

The call to awareness of our breath is a simple technique that tells us we are, we exist, in a fundamental, albeit physically/materially, way. All breathe though we don’t know why; why in the grandiose sense. Yet there are simple activities, x-ings (walking, talking, sitting, etc.), that we can choose to spend our breath on. It’s not the activity that confers meaning to our breaths, its the breaths we spend on an activity that gives that activity meaning. Choose well and breathe for something, anything that fancies you and give it meaning.

1 Like
5

I’m sorry to be blunt, but you argue like someone with a chip on their shoulder.

It ought not to be forgotten that ‘awareness of breath’ meme originated with Indian meditation techniques, which are embedded in a culture embodying the ideal of enlightenment, within which meditation (‘sati’ or ‘bhavana’) is but one element, even if an important one.

1 Like
6

Spot on!

I believe there are terms in Western thought, like “pneuma” in Greek, “soul” in Judeo-Christian thought, that speak to the same idea. A person/living organism was “something that breathes”. The Indians of course went to town with it, developing elaborate physical/mental yogic breathing exercises.

1 Like
7

You say I’m arguing with resentment, yet I see no answer. You speak of culture, meditation, and other things. But the very essence of philosophy — which you are trying to hold me to — is counterargument. So far, all I see is an unwillingness to answer the question from any angle: cultural, personal, or philosophical — free from the lens of external influence.
As Bertrand Russell put it: “Philosophy is to be studied not for definite answers, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves.” And Peter Abelard went further: “The key to wisdom is constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question, by questioning we arrive at the truth.”
I am questioning. That is the point.

1 Like
8

I agree 100% with your half-poetic, half-philosophical intuition regarding meaning.

Allow me to ground it in actual metaphysics:

Meaning is simply the immanent, return-to-self inherent to the Life category of beings.

The meaning of a flying swallow is strictly the immediate, internal pleasure the swallow experiences in the act of flying. It is Life experiencing its own Being.

For humans, this meaning is simultaneously more intense and more distant. It always feels like an effort because, as living entities operating on this return-to-self loop, we are strictly meta-apes. Our specific biological function is meta-mimicry (the mimicry of mimicry). Our identity literally resides in what we are within the universal Thought of others. Consequently, there is a structural, metaphysical distance between ourselves and our own meaning that we are forced to deeply think of as you have greatly done.

This is precisely the meaning the teenage Leonardo da Vinci assigned to his own life. Because he happened to be a genius, he assigned to his life the goal to receive eternal fame.

9

Does one’s own meaning of life need justified?

10

Is non-bodily immortality meaningful? In what sense?

11

The striving can be someone’s meaning.

2 Likes
12

The problem is that the conclusion doesn’t follow.

First, your demand to “show me where it is” is a simple category mistake. Meaning is not an object that we point to. And transcendence, if it means anything at all, is not one more “thing” in the world alongside other things.

Second, “this is unprovable” doesn’t imply “this is not real”. Many (perhaps most) things are not provable, yet we don’t consign them to the metaphysical dustbin. Other minds, moral obligation, the value of truth, the reliability of reason — none of these can be “proven” like a mathematical theorem, yet few would maintain they are simply unreal.

Third, you haven’t actually argued that meaning is fundamentally personal. You’ve simply stated that no one has yet demonstrated transcendent meaning to your satisfaction.

Fourth, the collapse of all meaning to “personal meaning” is phenomenologically inaccurate. I don’t manufacture meaning — I discover it, I interpret it,I test it, I share it, I submit to it, sometimes I distort it. Meaning places demands on me in a way that can’t straight forwardly be reduced to “personal choice”.

Fifth, if all meaning collapses to the personal, then what of justice, truth, cruelty, betrayal, fidelity, responsibility? If these are merely self-authored preferences, then we can no longer identify the life that is “personally meaningful” and yet false, degrading and evil.

Finally, your claim “what is unprovable cannot be the basis of meaning for everyone” is simply false. Many communities do in fact use the unprovable as a basis for shared meaning. In fact, I strongly suspect that all human communities do, and that it is likely a condition for the possibility of community at all.

1 Like
13

I am not looking for loose diamonds
Or pretty girls with crosses around their necks
I don’t want four roses and water
I am not looking for God
And I just want to see what’s next.
—Ray Wylie Hubbard

That’s the meaning of life— I just want to see what’s next.

2 Likes
14

There are many culturally established meanings. I agree with you that meaning cannot be purely personal since without social induction there can be no personal meaning, or in fact even any persons.

On the other hand Dennis has a point―which is that there is no definitively determinable culturally transcendent meaning. A great part of the conflict in human life is concerned with disagreement over culturally determined meanings, and the mistake immanent within those conflicts is the belief that culturally determined meanings are absolute.

15

But again, this doesn’t follow. Is there disagreement? Yes. Is there conflict? Yes. Are people overconfident in their beliefs? Yes. Does this imply that there is no truth? No.

Take yourself, for example. Presumably you have beliefs. Presumably you have taken a bit of care in the task of inquiring into what is true. Perhaps you even have the humility to recognize that you might be wrong. But this is different from denying the very possibility of being right. Or else why are we even having this conversation right now?

Is this disagreement between us — our conflict here and now — just the result of us taking our own culturally determined meanings to be absolute? Is your claim that “there is no culturally transcendent meaning” itself, nothing more than another culturally determined meaning? Or are you presenting it as a general insight about the human condition — a meaning that transcends the boundaries of any particular cultural tradition? Because insofar as you are, you are quietly undermining the force of your own claim.

16

I didn’t read John as saying there is no truth. He was saying that it isn’t definitely determinable. Which could well be a reasonable assessment.

This kind of objection works best if we assume that any meaningful claim must either be absolutely culture-transcendent or collapse into self-refutation, and that assumption seems to be what his anti-foundationalist position quesions. Saying “there is no culturally transcendent meaning” isn’t an attempt to step outside all contexts and pronounce a universal, exceptionless truth; it seems more of a broadly applicable insight about how meaning operates; that it’s always shaped within practices and traditions. Its usefulness is in its explanatory power, not from claiming an impossible, context-free authority. So I’m not sure that its undermines itself; it includes itself within the very conditions it describes.

17

Hence why knowledge of the Good was said to require becoming good. As Boethius says: “by the same logic as men become just through the possession of justice, or wise through the possession of wisdom, so those who possess divinity necessary become divine. Each happy individual is therefore divine. While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.”

18

Anyhow, as regards the broader topic, it might be helpful to define “meaning.”

Because depending on what is meant by the term, claims about “meaning’s” dependence on, say, individual tastes or cultural context, can be variously trivial or rather extreme metaphysical theses. Unfortunately, there is a sort of poverty in colloquial philosophical language where “meaning” is variously used for semantic content, reference, telos, noetic/intelligible realities, etc., and equivocation is apt to lead us in circles. The claim that meaning varies by language seems obvious in one sense, but not so in another, and in still another it might imply that people speaking different languages occupy discrete realities.

19

It’s one of those that one doesn’t define, but enumerate to make it clear. Some examples that come to mind are: “life is a struggle” (for those who find any endeavor a suffering). Or how about this: “life is a journey” (for those see the passing of time as events and happenings to enjoy, to endure, or to keep as memories).

More examples:

“Life is what you make it”, meaning that you make do of what you have or chase the things that are high above.

20

Indeed it could, depending on what it means. If he means something like “unprovable”, then sure, I agree. If he means something like “unknowable”, then I think we’re back in self-refutation territory.

But this isn’t how universal quantification works. When you deny the reality or the existence of something, you are making a universal, exceptionless truth claim. If there were any exceptions, then the claim would just be false.

My point is simply that insofar as the claim purports to be true for everyone, everywhere, it also purports to express a meaning or imperative that transcends any particular cultural milieu. It would hardly be acceptable for someone to reply “well, I’m English, so your claim is not applicable to me”. And that’s the point. To the extent that the author intends his claim to be universally binding, to that extent he commits himself to the reality of something like universal meaning.