What is the point of life if we and every trace of humanity?

I'm not asking about purpose. As an example: I write a book, then I die. Any emotional payoff I got from my work dies with me. Other people read it and die. They mifght as well have not read it, unless the book maybe drove them to "improve" human society. But that society will die too, like if the sun gets so big it swallows the earth. Even if we had settled other worlds by then, they'll eventually die by supernova or Big Crunch or whatever.

This is an interesting point. It really embraces the spirit of nihilism- where they is no value to anything. Yet there is an exception to this for you. That is that you seem to value death more than life. It's funny because the really genuine curiosity that drives people is not as easy to obtain these days i.e. you must get a degree to explore other countries for a living.

Anyway my point is that although Earth will die at a certain point in time, you and I who are still living get to enjoy what is still here. What other planets offer a nice hot bath and sauna, sex, drugs and music etc. I guess you have to be a little bit selfish to believe there is meaning to what we do.

If I write a best selling album, then die, the payoff is the wild sex, drugs, parties, travel and life of luxury I get in the meantime between the writing and the death, a good few years I would hope. For the peole who listen to the album, they get pleasure and lead a slightly more pleasing life beofre they die.

Satyesu, I'm wondering if you are basically saying that Life has no meaning? For me, Life is one of those things that some would say "is what it is". Isn't it up to us as individuals to assign meaning to events, circumstances, and others? Certainly you have every right to believe what you think is right, but why negate your own existence? I believe that life is what you make it, and I understand completely that your thoughts and opinions are just as valid to you or anybody else. For me, I have to be a positive thinker to be happy, and and I see a second part to positive thinking, and that is the elimination of negative thinking. If I have to wear a light tint of rose-colored glasses to live in peace and contentment, I will wear them every time. If there is no meaning, does that mean there is no responsibility? What are the consequences for that, considering our relationship with and in Society?

The answers given so far to the question, I believe, deliver an answer that is quite clear : the answer can only be subjective. Asking one person what is the meaning of life will always result in a personal answer. The reason is because the meaning we attribute to our living is always linked to our most important value. If you were to ask me, I would answer that each individual should lead his life in order to contribute to the development of humanity. I believe that heritage is the best way to leave your mark and to give meaning to your existence. That is my personal opinion.

satyesu,

What if we: invent a time machine and we just go back to the beginning of a habitable earth every time there is a major problem. Then every thing would have a point, and the point now is to get to that point.

Or maybe just a craft that can travel to a different dimension to wait out any storm.

Or maybe death isn't the end.

Let's combine the last two and say that's what a body is and that's what life is for.

Or we can talk about how great life is, and even though one sees no point, they know there must some point, and just make up their own for the time being. Other wise they would follow their grim logic to conclusion and end their life(Which I don't recommend in all seriousness).

Perhaps were in the matrix and the point is to generate electricity.

Or were some alien kids science experiment that he left in his closet.

Maybe you could use it like a Monday through Friday thing, and change it up and on weekends. Maybe toss a coin to see what it's going to be on Saturday and Sunday.

You decide which one you like best.

[Scott]

This topic reminds me greatly of my old topic, What Really Matters? But that topic is in a more spacial regard while this one is in a temporal one. Can they answer be any different? If you as one human lived forever on Earth would you still say you or your life has some special so-called 'purpose' or 'meaning' considering how tiny you are spatially? If it turned out that actually the Earth was flat and the existence of outerspace was a hoax but you still were mortal and would be dead in a 100 years or so and forgotten in time, would that allow your life to have this special so-called 'purpose' or 'meaning' considering your existence would be tiny temporally speaking and you would eventually be forgotten for longer than you were alive or remembered? It seems to me this special so-called 'purpose' or 'meaning' is impossible without one living forever in a spatially tiny universe. If one can at least find importance and value in some sense of the word despite being small spatially then I think one can do it temporarily, but I think it is easier to start with the first as thinking in terms of time is not only more complex but raises one's strong instinctive and perhaps irrational fears of death.

Nonetheless, I suspect the conclusion that one's life or even humanity itself is completely purposeless and meaningless in either case stems from a false dichotomy fallacy. One seems to think that if one cannot have this super-special purpose or meaning in the strictest most extreme universal sense that then one is purposeless and meaningless. Those who point out the various potential forms of subjective meaning and purpose are only directing hitting at that fundamental fallacy by pointing out with an example that there is other options besides those implicitly or explicitly implied by this false dichotomy fallacy. This false dichotomy fallacy is particularly remarkable because it first requires only considering the potential for purpose or meaning in the most universally extreme sense if not inherently impossible at least so unlikely even hypothetically to be absurd, and then concluding from the lack of that most extreme, unlikely, absurd form of meaning or purpose that the other extreme--perhaps as absurd or even more absurd--that nothing we do matters at all in anyway and has no purpose or meaning and that we might as well commit suicide by self-starvation now because there is no point in eating or anything we do. This is uniquely fallacious like assuming that there are no 5-ton big talking blue ducks with spaceships that there are no ducks at all in that not only is it false dichotomy fallacy but it is an especially misleading one by making us choice not only between a falsely limited number of options but by making at least one of the options patently absurd as to make the other the only option. (Please note, I'm not accusing anyone of being intentionally dishonest or misleading or accusing anyone of being especially illogical, but rather think this is a common extreme fallacy many if not most if not almost all people are prone to make on their own.)

Personally, I do not care much what happen on planets like Jupiter or Mars or the various extrasolar planets, but I care very deeply in some cases about what happens on Earth particularly in certain places. Importance of course is subjective, and thus provides for a special kind of locally subjective so-called meaning or purpose. The same goes for time. I care about what happens here and now, not a billion years from now. The fact that what happens in a billion years on Earth doesn't matter much to me or anyone I know--at least not nearly to the degree as what happens now on Earth--does not make what happens now also unimportant to me anymore than the fact that I do not care much about the day-to-day happenings on Pluto and all other planets means I care less about what happens on Earth.

Since we are objective AND subjective beings, why would we want to remove the subjective perspective? It is the Creative Center, and that includes ideas, of which some are true and some are false. It is also the source of the Imagination, which allows us to think outside of the box when we need to. Isn't much of "reality" subjective anyway because it is subject to interpretation and is not totally rational? If we don't utilize both rationality and the subjective, we aren't taking advantage of all the information out there (or in there). For example, one of the world's greatest scientists ( I think it was Bohr, but am not sure, dreamed of a snake swallowing it tail [oroboros?] discovered the benzine ring after this dream.