I honestly take some comfort in the utter pointlessness of everything. I think I would be a ridiculous bag of nerves if I thought for one second that my actions had some huge impact on everything. It's nice to know that time keeps on rolling without me.

Life is what you make of it.

If you believe in a higher power, in a specific morality, in a certain cause, in a particular goal ... then for you, life is tied to that. You might have decided you want to spread the joy of 52-Card Pickup far and wide, and for you that would be a life affirming goal.

I do feel far, far, far too many people get caught up in seeking validation. They want others to validate them, validate their choices. They want agreement, support, and backing. They want their decisions to be seen as correct in the view of others.

That's chasing your tail. People are fickle, selfish, distracted, greedy, and indifferent. Love is defined by how it overrides these negative traits. If you love someone, you'll concern yourself with their concerns, you'll share, you'll open up, you'll make time for them. Meanwhile, that random guy who lives two doors down, not so much. One person you love, the other you don't.

That's how we are to almost every single person on the planet. It's just how it is. Do you care about some random person in Hawaii, or Siberia, or sitting in traffic in Taiwan? No, of course you don't. You have your own problems, your own goals and concerns and dreams to be getting on with. And those random people don't care about yours either, so we're all more or less even.

At the end of The Truman Show, Truman walks off stage, and the show ends. For all the audiences; us as well as the people in the film who were watching Truman. The answer they give there is just as honest and realistic as the one we gave at the end of the movie. It's the same one we give at any funeral, or really any time you're made aware of a death that isn't yours. What else is on now?

So death is really only final for the dead person. For everyone else who isn't dead, life goes on. That's not callous, that's just life. Are we supposed to fracture and fall apart, become non-functional humans just because someone close to us dies?

Some people do disintegrate, and sometimes follow their departed beloved into death themselves. Which is beautifully tragic on some levels, but on others is a waste. And how you view it tends to depend on how you view the people involved. If it's your parents, you're emotionally weighed by the death of the first; and probably moreso by the second. But you might find the second wasteful, or selfish, or poetic, or a lot of things. Who knows? It would depend on your relationships with your parents, how you look(ed) upon them, and so on.

If a public figure dies, the public has equally varied reactions. I know I'll never get the end of the Song of Ice and Fire series, so when George R R Martin dies, to me it'll just be a confirmation of what I've already accepted. If Chris Evans or Robert Downey Jr had died just before they began shooting Avengers Endgame ... I would have been quite upset. Not fatally so, but still it would have been a big hit.

The thing about death is its finality. I find it kind of worthless to obsess over what follows your own death. After all, you won't be there for any of it, so why should you care? And if you do, you're engaging in something that by definition you'll never know, never influence, never be able to correct, and all of that more or less adds up to a waste of time.

But others disagree. They feel they can influence what might follow their death. An easy example would be a family; the matriarch might look back at her place in the ancestry that led to her, and on to the descendants she'd be leaving, and find that to be a form of influence. That she's had chances to shape and teach and impart upon them various things she finds important, and can decide to whatever degree she likes to believe these things would continue on thanks to her efforts.

Someone else might want to "change the world". Maybe they want to drive a movement of some sort (52-Card Pickup, it's the next big thing), or maybe they want to invent a technology, build some structure, something like that.

Somewhere in history, somewhere, lost to us never to be found or known, is someone who first had the idea to build The Pyramids. After all, it's highly unlikely those structures just appeared out of nowhere, and equally unlikely the society in the area just kind of collectively showed up one day to begin building. Someone had the idea, which led to planning and decisions about how to do it, and then to the doing. Probably, after that first initial thought, lots of other people joined in to turn it eventually into The Pyramids, but someone still had the first notion of them.

Maybe that person, if they have any awareness post-death, might be pleased to know The Pyramids still exist. There are bridges and highways and ports and cities and all sorts of "things" that've been created, and all of them started with one person. All of them eventually included many people to make happen, but someone at some point looked at a patch of desert and thought "yeah, but what if we put a big 3-d triangle, like, right there."

Rich people often get increasingly charitable as they age. Other people often accuse them of "trying to buy legacy" at this point, as the rich person runs around looking for places that'll take money in exchange for plastering the Rich Name across whatever gets built or sponsored.

Sometimes someone, maybe rich or maybe just well connected or highly influential, will start young and try to "build something". All the great companies, for example, at one point weren't companies. Great or otherwise. They got built because someone started building them. At least some of those, just like all the bridges and so forth, came into being because that first thinker thought it'd be cool to know it's their notion that's shaping reality.

Anyone who figures out the secret of life will have it made. Because, even if The Secret doesn't put dinner on the table, all the talk shows and speaking engagements, the book and movie deals, the everything they'd be able to likely reap from the rest of us would.

There is no perfect answer in life. To life. For life. There's just your answer. And that's a great answer. For you.

Life isn't an algorithm. Or, at least, not one humanity will ever be in a position to solve. There's too much data, too many ever changing variables, for it to be conceivable we could ever create a perfect predictor that Knows All. Chasing The One Solution is therefore a vast waste of time in my view.

Then again, Douglas Adams postulated a people who spent generations creating and programming such a machine. Only for it to give them an answer they didn't understand.

Meanwhile, Adams had himself a nice old chuckle over the concept. And shared it with others, many of whom also had a bit of a laugh as well. Then they all moved on, because that's what you do. That's what happens.

Life moves on.

I'll take your scattered thoughts and add my own.

We're just apes that got too intelligent. It is evolutionarily useful to empathise, to feel other being's pain. You can do things with that, like predict where the wounded deer's going to go, or properly negotiate with another tribe. I find it endlessly fascinating that our ability to ask ourselves these questions is an accidental side effect to the increase in our brainpower.

No one can give you the answers you want. They can use emotive words, like freedom or will or choice or gods. Words that we smart apes made up to give colour to our haywire neurons. Some of those words might even work on you, and allow your haywire neurons to create other connections. But the answers aren't magical. You're an ongoing chemical reaction. You love your family because familial love was useful for humans (not for octopodes). We have suffering because pain is useful for the preservation of life. We love pets because they hijack our parenting instincts. Every one of these questions has an answer, it's just not an answer that makes our ape brains happy.

I can say something like "you need to find your own answers". By doing so, I'd be appealing to your emotions, using Western concepts that appeal to Western cultural sensitivities. And honestly, there's nothing wrong with this, because none of us will ever live long enough to outlast those concepts.

Agreed that existence is fundamentally meaningless. Everything we know about the universe so far points to that conclusion. That doesn't make it true, but it does make it the most likely truth.

For me personally, the base meaninglessness is part of what makes existence profound.

We have the, arguably useless, but nonetheless incredible ability to make meaning. And, as far as we know, we're the only creatures that can do it. The only apes that can wonder what it means to ape.

As a result of the meaning we create, we experience achingly beautiful moments of joy, wonder and pain. Moments which are more profound because they are so fleeting and so meaningless to anything in the universe but us.

Another piece of the meaning puzzle, for me, is curiosity. I want to exist because I want to know what happens next. It won't matter, not in any universal way, but it's enough that I get to participate in it.

Related to that is the knowledge that, however remarkable or mundane, every moment is unique in the entire span of time and space. Ultimately pointless but also ultimately singular.

And we can share some of those singularities. Only a bit, because we're all hallucinating existence in very different ways, but that's exactly what makes it meaningful. At its core existence is deeply lonely, no one sees the same world we do. No one can fully see us. Which makes those moments when experience feels genuinely shared like flashes of light and warmth in the darkness.

Not just when we connect with other people, but when we connect with any aspect of life, or ourselves, in a way that ties us to a larger scope than whatever our baseline is.

There's meaning in stumbling on in search of the next flash of connection.

Finally, existence is additive. We're constantly collecting context. A moment I experience now, is deeper and more nuanced than one I experienced 20 years ago because I'm bringing 20 extra years of knowledge and memories and accumulated experience into that moment. I have more points of reference, more ways to connect. Which makes the flashes more vivid.

I find a lot of meaning in the knowledge that the adventure is always evolving, and it can always be more than before.

So for me, even though there is no fundamental meaning, each moment has meaning. It's arbitrary and transient, but it's still meaning.

Right up until my heart stops and all that context I collected ceases to exist and, not long after, every impact I've had on the world is lost to time and entropy.

I have struggled and still struggle with much the same.

Unfortunately, I believe the only answers that have the possibility of being fully satisfying are fictional delusions crafted by a mix of human dreams, hallucinations, and imagination.

Some points from my experience:

• The universe doesn't care that humans crave meaning and understanding. Meaning is a construct of humans (or at least sentient, conscious beings).
• Faith, as a pattern of brain activity, allows humans to set aside existential problems and concentrate on more immediate tasks. This includes conventional religion as well as humanism, etc.
• The more I dwell on existential and philosophical issues, the more depressed I become and the more meaningless life seems.
• We are first and foremost animals, not rational, incorporeal brings. I try to stay grounded in the real world.
• The human animal is happiest when integrated in a community where their contributions are appreciated and considered valuable.

Don't spend too much of your life staring into the abyss. There are better ways to appreciate existence.

I am a materialist, and I don't believe there is anything metaphysical about existence. Due to some health conditions, I've had to start facing the fear of death at a young age. As a philosophizing person, this led me to question many many many things about life.

At the current moment, I "enchant" my view of the universe with cosmic horror. Lovecraft grasped a fundamental truth about the universe: it is vast, and its laws don't care about us. He then turned these laws into dark gods, and wrote stories based on this. Simply trying to grasp or being exposed to their truth was enough to drive people mad.

I sometimes think of this short essay, "An Alien God". The author argues that if there is a god, it's evolution, and that it's a Lovecraftian god.

In a way, Darwin discovered God—a God that failed to match the preconceptions of theology, and so passed unheralded. If Darwin had discovered that life was created by an intelligent agent—a bodiless mind that loves us, and will smite us with lightning if we dare say otherwise—people would have said "My gosh! That's God!"

But instead Darwin discovered a strange alien God—not comfortably "ineffable", but really genuinely different from us. Evolution is not a God, but if it were, it wouldn't be Jehovah. It would be H. P. Lovecraft's Azathoth, the blind idiot God burbling chaotically at the center of everything, surrounded by the thin monotonous piping of flutes.

Which you might have predicted, if you had really looked at Nature.

As a life scientist, I subscribe to this notion, to some extent. The universe is too often and too profoundly hostile. There are trillions of animals that die each year, in a single planet, among hundreds of billions of galaxies, which probably contain at least billions of life-contaning planets each. If a person is horrified by humanity's destruction of life, then it should declare nature the most abusive thing to exist.

Yet life is also beautiful. It enchants us. More specifically, there is room for growth, love, compassion, excitement, and similar things. These are not distributed equally to everyone, and for some it's sadly almost nothing but misery. But... that's the thing. I am alive. I am an individual. I was born into this world. I was thrust into existence. So, focusing on the bad parts, no matter how awful or cosmically evil they may be, does not help me. In fact, it makes it worse. Therefore, it's not logical for me to keep focusing on the meaninglessness of life.

A related concept is mind-dependent value. There's this article that talks about it, which changed my perspective. Basically, while there is no mind-independent value in the universe, we can find mind-dependent values. In other words, we can find values that are based on the human mind.

I think, based on these two postulates, we can deduce that the logical thing to do is to affirm one's own life., because doing otherwise is only hurtful to the person. After all, if I adapt a value system and outlook on life that run contrary to the emotional needs of my mind, it will hurt. It will deny life, my own life, and the end of that reasoning is suicide. And unless under extreme circumstances with incurable and very painful ailments, I don't think we should affirm suicide. Because there's a more mind-dependently meaningful way.

For this reason, I'm trying to affirm life, but not in a Nietzschean eternal recurrence way that doesn't solve the problem at all. It's by trying to find happiness and meaning, and by building tolerance for the ails of life. This requires me to take care of my physical and mental health, and invest in developing emotional skills, which I'm currently working on.

So this is my approach to this problem at the moment of writing this. Universe's powers are chaotic, whimsical, unfeeling gods, rather than the ultimate parent-projections of Abrahamic religions. This results in a fundamentally unjust existence. But focusing on that only enhances this injustice. So I adapt, and try to strengthen the fire within.

"Cells consume. Life itself is wrong, and that means death is right. But you can't side with that. So you live, even when it means eating."

"By nature of the relentless absurdity of existence, it wouldn't make a difference whether it ever happened or not, when all is said and done."

No, it makes absolutely no difference, cosmically, if I had ever existed.

However:

a) I do exist
b) I believe/understand at some level that I exist in this scheme of things
c) My brain cannot possibly understand the enormity of the cosmos and my place in it
d) I can however experience and enjoy the now, despite "knowing" that I will one day die, but that concept still being alien to me
e) I can try and bring happiness and peace to myself and those around me.

What does my head in is that we are so cosmically insignificant and have been given a chance to experience a tiny fragment of this, and so many people are utter cunts.

And so we return again to the holy void. Some say this is simply our destiny, but I would have you remember always that the void EXISTS, just as surely as you or I. Is nothingness any less a miracle than substance?

• Sister Miriam Godwinson, "We Must Dissent"

As some Ayn Randians put it, “Why are we here? Because we’re here. Roll the bones!”

Buddhists might say we are here because harmony is incapable of non-being.

I feel a great resistance to non-being, ineffable and without origin. I call this one of the faces of God.

As an aside, I think it is hubris to discount all who claim to talk to God. Falsifiability is valuable for understanding the material world, but does not foreclose the existence of various other states of being. Until one can legitimately claim to have all knowledge, one cannot exclude any knowledge.

God need not be omnipotent to exist. In fact, if God is omnipotent, choice is meaningless ( a variant corollary on Epicurus’ theorems). Any being with consciousness shares power with God and other conscious beings.

Ultimately there is no separation between being and non-being, is there?

From a logical perspective, there is no reason we're here.

It's believed that up until a certain stage of development, it doesn't occur to babies that objects exist outside their own experience of them. In particular, if you don't see it, it might just not exist, so games like peek-a-boo are not only a rather mundane kind of entertainment, but a baffling demonstration of the wonders of the world.

Here, you similarly can't perceive a logical reason and surmise that there is none, confusing ignorance with knowledge. The result is the absurdity you experience: you know that there is no logical reason for us to be here, so being here at all is as baffling and magical as peek-a-boo is to the baby. It seems pointless to you because you have already decided, in ignorance, that there is no point.

For what it's worth, I don't attach any value judgement to that. I think it's innately human. We're in kind of an awkward position where we are prone to think of and deeply care for such things, yet limited by our experience to only ever arrogantly assume or concede to being clueless.

You are right. It's just that it takes too long for people to realize. And some never will.

Anyway, Stanislaw Lem wrote Golem IV in 1981. There's an excerpt (the most important part) on YouTube where I've pirated it from Vimeo. It's an optimistic take.

I will be speaking as a theist, and hopefully I'm able to conveyy beliefs about God, why we exist, and how it makes me feel. I won't state my religion outright, just that it's Abrahemic.

To begin with, God is eternal, and absolute. Godnis the first , and God is the last. Godnhas always existed and will always exist. This is a belief. God can't be proved or disproved, and that's the point. Why? This leads to the second point.

Why do we exist? I believe that God created us to Worship him, that is, the sole and primary reason for our existence is to worship God completely willingly, and freely. To worship him despite never being ever certain that he exists, Of God could be proved, there will be no choice but to worship him, thus negating our free will.

An obvious question is why does God want to us to Worship him. Well, I don't know, and no human or Angel was ever privy to such knowledge. My belief is that only God knows why, so no use thinking about it.

Important to say this before the next point: To God belong all good names, he is The Merciful, The Just, The all-knowing, The all-seeing, The Forgiver, The Kind, The all-powerful, The Wise, The Patient, and all other good titles. Again, this is belief, and I can't believe otherwise since to me, a god that's not any of these things can't be a god.

Our mortal life is inherently unfair, because Man (mankind) is free to do what it wishes, including all manners of Injustice. If God intervened, that would interfere with our free will.

But that's only for our mortal life. God didn't create us for funzies, and he won't let Injustice go without consequence. For that there is a judgement day, where The Most Just will judge all, and give everyone back their deserved rights. All under a framework of Mercy, Wisdom, and Justice.

As such, nothing worldy matters. Money, health, power, whatever, won't matter. How much do humans live? A 100 years max? 150? How much has humanity existed? 10k years? 100k? 200k (homo spaiens)? In my Belief, there is an eternity after death, and I mean eternity eternity, never ending until God wishes so. So even if my life consisted of a 100 years of suffering, there IS something after death, thus I can keep my piece of mind.

Addenum: There can't be conflict between science and religion. Any presumed conflict is a product of Man's ignorance and arrogant interpretation of Religion.

So, there's also this:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=god+on+trial&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:e17f9875,vid:tD7v9phroGM,st:0

This is God on Trial, based on Elie Wiesel's The Trial of God. I'm not sure what to say about it, but it's extremely well acted and directed and written and explores these issues with feeling.

You got to be random so I get to be too? And your post, and these ideas are so timely, because I'm in a really bleak place.

I have test scores that objectively prove I'm better at logic than 99.9% of people who care enough to take the tests. But it hasn't got me shit, really. The only reasonable conclusion I can reach is that the only thing that matters is personal satisfaction, however you define it for yourself, and that if you reach a point where you can no longer obtain a sufficient quantity of personal satisfaction, the only reasonable response is to kill yourself.

I was on the trail the other day, and I saw a butterfly being stung to death by yellow jackets. WTF kind of world is this? Life in nature is nasty, brutish, and short. The ultimate end for any of us is dinner, it's only a matter of when, how, and for whom. I see no reason to proceed.

And yet, here I am. As I state elsewhere, I have an undeniable and insurmountal preference for being. WTF is that? Where does that come from? Biological wiring? Electrochemical conditioning? Space Aliens? Whencever, it spells only one result: my life is not my own.

And so I suffer, sometimes in silence, sometimes in protest, sometimes with grim acceptance, sometimes in gritty resentment. And once in a while, the sun shines through and everything is so beautiful I think I'm going to evaporate.

I agree with you 100%. It is absurd.

Slavery, exploitation, racism, misoginy, greedy. It would be better if we didn't exist at all.

I lost a brother, my parents are old and becoming frail, even more now that they lost a son.

It is too much suffering.

But I am alive anyway so I try to make the best of it.