Ask Lemmy

There isn't one, we're animals with higher brain function.

Try to ease suffering by being less savage and overcoming the animal instincts of hoarding and violence which are antithetical tou our capacity to form cohesive societies.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

If there's no sequel to a movie, what's the point of watching it?

Here's my take - if there's any merit to the heaven and hell stuff, it's purely in the last minutes of you actually dying (assuming a not-sudden death). Something your brain might conjure up before you go, premised on your remaining memories and attitudes towards life. If you mostly feel guilt about what you've done in your life, it will probably be an experience akin to hell. Joy, and a bittersweet sadness about leaving this world? Probably closer to heaven. And perhaps many various experiences in between that don't neatly map to this. All mostly a play of the last final, firing synapses before the curtain falls.

If we take this approach, what does it say about living? Well, I'd say that it's important to live as fully and well as you can. Do good things. Make good connections with other humans and love people worth loving. Help people out. Have a laugh, read a good book once and a while. Live a life that, when it's all said and done, has honestly good material to draw from in those final moments before oblivion.

I frankly find the idea of an afterlife horrifying. You're a disembodied conciousness existing eternally - not a million years, not a billion, endless existence.

And what are you supposed to in the afterlife? Have a family reunion? Replay your fondest memories like you're watching an old VHS tape? Explore your wildest fantasies (but not the ones your deity frowns upon)? In the long term it just sounds as agonizing as hell.

I think the point is to just enjoy what you can while you can. And if you can help others you should do that too.

As Ricky Gervais once said (paraphrasing), "If you went to see a movie and in the middle of it realized it was eventually going to end would you just say, 'Oh, I guess I'll leave because there's no point.'"

My wife is soft and makes me happy.

I would flip the question. If there is a heaven or afterlife, then what is the point of living? Really, what's the point if you just get another awesome life later on? Is this all meaningless aside from proving to God that you will praise him?

Without an afterlife, then the life right now takes on so much more weight and importance, because it's all you get.

The purpose of life is to experience it. Experience as much of it as you can, before you can't anymore. The good, the bad, the mundane, or insane.

Try to live a good life. What the definition of "good" is will be different for each person, but a few general categories include being good to others (help when you can), being good to yourself (don't be your own worst enemy, mentally or physically), and being good to the world (leave it better than you found it).

Cherish the things that you have, and the things that you don't.

If there is a heaven, what's the point of living? Just take me there right now

The common argument to this is why does it matter as you did not exist before your birth (unless you believe in reincarnation). It helps to learn a lot about time space. Particularly how forward and backwards does not matter much to it time wise and how long after you are dead your life could be observed if looking from other areas of the universe. So to some degree regions of time/space like our lives are eternal we just don't realize it.

The afterlife lasting an eternity may not be all that it's cracked up to be. I enjoy this quote because it provides a different perspective of looking at our daily lives.

"Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today."

• Alan Watts

To explore and understand the significance of your existence because from my understanding ( ignorant ) we don’t really have an answer to our origin but rather an idea. History which is knowledge passed down, is always written from the perspective of the “winner” and rarely the losers.

You might enjoy the show "The Good Place"

If there is no after life what is the point of living

I think you've got this backwards, it's because there's no after life that life is even more meaningful. Its the only experience you've ever known and likely will ever know so make the best of it. Do what you want. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Adopt an orphaned child. Build a house for a homeless person. Climb a mountain. Go skydiving. There is so much you can do and so little time to do it relative to our lifetimes.

I've been raised roman catholic, but am agnostic.

No afterlife just means that your current existence has even more meaning, because it's all you will ever experience. I want to be a nice and caring person, not for the promise of some afterlife where i get rewarded (which might happen or not), but for the sake of everyone around me, who also just have this one life - enhancing their lives has more meaning as well. If everyone would live in this spirit, our existence would be a much nicer experience.

Even if you disappear into nothingness, what you did and what you said will echo through the times; every kind action will live on through the people that experienced it, and will encourage them to do the same, having a multiplying effect.

Life is self-emerging. There is no higher or predefined purpose. You can live without one, or define your own, which may or may not change over time.

Regarding death as the ultimate conclusion; you can make of it what you want. You can consider what you leave behind. You can see life itself as worthwhile, without a need for an end-goal that follows after.

It's not black and empty. There's no you to feel those things.

The mind is what the brain does. It's a process, not a thing. It doesn't 'go' anywhere, and it doesn't sit there chewing on a lack of input either.

The brain stops doing, the mind stops being.

As for the point of it all: smoke 'em while you got 'em. Live your life, and try to make the world a bit better for others.

After all, there's nobody running the universe. Nobody to take care lest a sparrow fall. No justice, no redemption, nobody balancing the books. The only thing in the entire universe that gives a damn if we live or die is each other.

You want a purpose, there's your purpose. To do what only people can do: care about people and try to make their time on this rock better than it otherwise might be.

to shitpost, obviously

"It was a musical thing. You were supposed to sing, or dance, while the music was being played." -Alan Watts

That's the clearest I've heard it proposed so far, so I'm sticking with that.

With this ideology, when I stop breathing, I will quite literally become nothing. There will be nothing. I am dead.

I know. I'm sorry. If it helps, I'll be the same way too. We're all in this boat together. It's fucking terrifying. It's really pitch black after. Same way as it was before you were born. But we don't remember that, so it doesn't help.

It's made me lose sleep a lot too and I often wondered what I'm meant to achieve in lieu of devotion to God to make it all mean something or make it all worthwhile.

Each their own master, no universal judgement, and we all "go" to the same "place".

Beyond that, there's no ties that bind us in common goals or purpose, some guy on the street - he could do literally anything and you'll both be dead same way one day. CCTV isn't religion, and police isn't god, he has nothing to fear and I've everything to lose. It's scary.

Kinda wish I could be Christian honestly but unfortunately as far as I can tell, I am very literally incapable of faith.

I've not solved my anxiety about death, I don't think I can, but I've made a lot of progress.

Even without God, there are things I believe in, that matter to me. Why? I don't really know. I suppose I'm just genetically destined, wired to be that way by chance, but it feels 'right' to believe in these things.

I believe in the maximisation of happiness as a good thing, I want people to be happier and suffer less, and I want to do well unto others and myself in those terms.

From pushing egalitarian politics where I can to looking after myself and my loved ones and being kind and showing solidarity to others, and obviously not harming them. That's not meaning maybe, but it's purpose. Still basically Christian ethics, too.

Perhaps I won't be rewarded, but such is the reality of the mortal coil, I have to believe that at least I've lived such that the first sunrise I'll never see won't be any dimmer by my hand than the ones that greeted me on this earth. Maybe even brighter.

If that makes their day better, even as just one brick on the road towards oblivion, that's gotta count for something, right?

Maybe that's a reward in and of itself. Even if I won't remember anything, others will remember something.

Maybe that's enough.

Just because gods and heaven and hell aren't real, it doesn't mean that nothing is real. Kindness is real. Compassion is real. Understanding is real. That tingly feeling you get when you do something good for someone else is real. It may have been the product of countless years of evolution rather than divine whim, but it's still real.

If you're lucky, you'll have another 60 or 70 years of awareness ahead of you. Find meaning by seeking out that tingly feeling as much as you can :)

Whether or not you believe in the afterlife, the answer is the same. Bring joy to others, help people who need it, have people that depend on you. If there is confirmed no afterlife, I would keep living my life the same because I want my kids to have a great life, and grow up to be great people. That is a mission that makes me want to live as long as I can.

Life, itself, is full of incredible adventures, rewards, and amazing things to learn and experience.

In my experience, those who believe in some mythological “afterlife“ spend their time living as some of the worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and shitty people, because they falsely believe that, after they die, they will somehow be rewarded for being massive pieces of shit.

In the entire history of mankind, there has never been even the tiniest shred of evidence that this is anything which could be considered, reasonable, rational, or, especially, true.

I tend to think of more realistic terms. Enjoy the time you have, and make the best of it.

Invisible sky wizards that grant wishes are not coming to save you, nor are they coming to help or even save anyone else. They are a fantasy made up millennia ago by generations of itinerant desert nomad goat herders who never learned to read, let alone come to understand science. They are the last people you should ever be taking advice from.

Of course, if you have evidence of the contrary, I’m eager to see it.

I really like Camus' approach to these questions. Life is meaningless, the world is absurd, nothing matters in the end.
So, basically, try to find your meaning in life and enjoy it while it lasts. Because as far as we know, it's our one shot at life and it's pretty much one and done.

Many people have speculated on the point of life but the way I see it the only universal point of life is to reproduce..

You can make your own human existence about whatever you want though.

To me it sounds like you could benefit from helping people locally. Seeing the news of things happening on the other side of the globe can make you feel helpless but if you help out locally by volunteering or some other way that makes sense to you, you can combat that feeling of helplessness.

You didn't exist before you were conceived, and you're not anxious about it. You will just return to that state.
For me it's really the opposite, why would anyone want to live if there would be such a better place like heaven where everything is awesome for ever?

If there is nothing after life, only then it's worth living, because this is it, everything you can experience, god and bad you can only experience here and now, so you better make it count. Give your own life meaning, don't wait until someone else does.

In the end the universe will die a heat death and in the long run everything in meaningless. But in the short run, everything is full of meaning, it's exciting, dangerous, beautiful, horrible and so on.

Carl Sagan famously said, "We are a way for the universe to know itself."

This reflects his view that human beings, as conscious and curious creatures, are a product of the universe's evolution and serve as a means for the cosmos to become self-aware. Through our capacity for science, art, and philosophy, we explore and understand the universe, essentially allowing it to observe and contemplate its own existence.

Negative Utilitarianism.. To reduce Suffering in the world. To reduce more suffering than you cause.

So many great replies here, already.

But I haven't seen an answer to the "pitch dark forever" idea. I've had a perspective shared with me, which I think actually is more accurate:

The collection of atoms that currently think they're me will someday join other collections of atoms that think they're a rabbit, or don't realize they're a tree, and eventually, some will join a new collection that think they're someone else entirely.

If I leave the world a tiny bit cleaner or kinder then I found it, I'm doing a favor to those future collections of atoms that once briefly thought they were me.

Hi I'm also a religious person. Some religions have a big emphasis on what happens when we die, but it doesn't have to be that way. Judaism basically says, "I dunno, maybe we get reincarnated or resurrected or just go be with God. Anyway, do you want any mustard or mayo on that?"

God didn't put us here just as a test to see if we pass or fail. God didn't put us here to ignore the brokenness in the world either. God put us here to make things better. Our job is to be the light in the darkness and to leave things better than we found them.

At least that's what I believe. And I don't think you have to even believe in God to live that way.

Science as we know it is not equipped to answer the Hard Problem of Consciousness. There is no explanation or path to an explanation for what we are as self aware beings, how we are conscious, how we came to be so, or why this universe exists in the first place.

Religion may not be the best answer to these questions either, but it does offer a way to live with purpose.

I used to think there wasn't a point to life because we all just die. But then people told me that I couldn't be successful and that made me mad so now I'm fueled by spite. I've achieved almost everything I have set out to do so far in life, so now I'm just here to have a good time.

You are having what's called a crisis of faith and an existential crisis. Don't worry, millions of people have been through this ahead of you and come out the other side.

As a Buddhist if nothing happens after death most problems are solved lol. This is why I always find “secular” Buddhists funny. Either way being compassionate and a source of wisdom to others is important.