It needs no value

[ocean_corks]

Forebears have been on my mind lately. I imagine my grandmother's grandmother, or grandfather's grandfather, and think of their hopes and joys, suffering and sorrows. I think of the rich, dynamic experiences they had. What were they proudest of? What was their most embarrassing moment? What was their favorite food? What made them laugh, or cry? I couldn't tell you. I couldn't even tell you their names.

What was it for then?

The point of life is simple. It's to live. But what is its value? What did all that living mean?

Not a thing.

So much hand-wringing and brow-furrowing over something that means nothing. Give it a value, or not.

And if the quality of our lives is the sum of the experiences we've had, well I guess some people have had great lives, and some of us have had utterly shit lives. Whether good, bad, magnificent, and tragic, or whether honorable, scandalous, compassionate, or cruel: it is not going to mean a thing either way.

 

[whatevs]

Life is self-justified. You either like it, and thus you try not to die and have sex to prolong your own life in a roundabout way, or you don like it, so you die.

You seem caught up with something that also has confused me many times, the erasure that time implies. Of course, apparently nothing lasts, and all is forgotten. This very forum, when the server(s) keeping it online are no longer maintained, will completely disappear.

But life has very little to do with "leaving a mark", unless you are a pharaoh. It's about enjoying or being miserable, and if you are lucky, about finding answers to mystical and philosophical dilemmas. And lastly but more importantly, that which makes the manifested possible does not change, and cannot die. Something cannot come from nothing. Science has even discovered that a complete vacuum is likely impossible. Ergo, complete nihilism is just superficially rational, not actually rational. I'm talking about ontology now, I still am miserable, hate my life and see no agreeable meaning in my particular existence.

 

[demuic]

Forebears have been on my mind lately. I imagine my grandmother's grandmother, or grandfather's grandfather, and think of their hopes and joys, suffering and sorrows. I think of the rich, dynamic experiences they had. What were they proudest of? What was their most embarrassing moment? What was their favorite food? What made them laugh, or cry? I couldn't tell you. I couldn't even tell you their names.

What was it for then?

The point of life is simple. It's to live. But what is its value? What did all that living mean?

Not a thing.

So much hand-wringing and brow-furrowing over something that means nothing. Give it a value, or not.

And if the quality of our lives is the sum of the experiences we've had, well I guess some people have had great lives, and some of us have had utterly shit lives. Whether good, bad, magnificent, and tragic, or whether honorable, scandalous, compassionate, or cruel: it is not going to mean a thing either way.

The only purpose to life is to live long enough to pass on your genes. We are just biological machines and every aspect of our existence is revolved around that fact. At no point does the concept of enjoyment, meaning, or any other thing that people concern themselves with in the question of why we exist come into the equation. Humans have become highly complex organisms (at least the brain has) and so seek complex answers where none exist.

It's true that the value comes from the value that you give it. All is swept away in the end. The lives of the majority of human beings that have ever lived have no one to remember them, and in that sense it is like they never existed. Eventually, that will be the fate of all humankind, and life on earth as well.

 

[FuneralCry]

Life is just a pointless experience that we go through for the sake of it. There is no point to living. Life is completely unnecessary, we only exist because people decided to selfishly procreate. Many of us are brought into this world just to suffer. I take comfort from the fact that eventually this life will end and will be forgotten about, but the fact that so much pain exists is horrifying to think about. Everything about our lives is meaningless, things may matter to us in the short term, but eventually they will not as we cannot experience anything when we are dead.