does the pointlessness of your life bother you?

[Dan BRIGHT]

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I didnt read the thread since there was a lot of text written.

In short, life isnt pointless if your entire existence is put towards maximizing your happiness in every way possible.

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I found I became a lot happier once I stopped worrying about being happy so much.

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if you are WORRYING about being happy you are doing it wrong

[Xaston]

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The point of my life is to be as happy as possible. Sometimes I get this satisfaction out of making a lot of money, sometimes I get it from helping others, sometimes I get it from companionship, sometimes I get it from pursuing hobbies. What do you even mean by "pointless?" Do you mean that there is no pre-determined point of our life? No clear way of defining success? No common goal which we all attempt to accomplish? No way to significantly impact the world in the future as an individual?

I don't sit and figure out what I should be doing with my life, or how I should be contributing more to sicety or something. Does this mean my life is pointless? Maybe we're just cogs in a machine or insects going through the motions, but who cares? Life is awesome and sitting around worrying about what the "point" to it is, well, pointless. Mortality is worth being depressed about, life certainly isn't.

James

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Excellent post. My thoughts exactly.

[MusashiStyle]

it bothers me but i'm not totally convinced that life is in fact pointless.
it's like this see; around 1900 they said that physics was dead and nothing new would ever come up except for more and more sophisticated versions of old ideas.

Now, given the relevations of relativity and qm, can you really say that we already know as much as we ever will?

I think not, despite the fact that the question in OP is not confined to science but to the more generalized question of philosophy and "why are we here?". but I would argue that philisophical ideas are expanding as well though i have no background in philosophy.

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Mushashi, QM should convince just about anyone that we can never really know that much at all about anything.

Philosophical ideas are actually contracting, not expanding. 2500 years ago Aristotle tackled everything from the anatomy of the frog to the acceleration of falling bodies to politics to ethics to chemistry to epistemology. Over the years, more and more of these sciences have branched off into their own, and philosophy has been left with the remains. Actually, not much new ground has been broken since Kant in the basic questions.

[Big Poppa Smurf]

Even if there is a meaning or point to life, it seems really presumptuous for me to think I know either the purpose of either my own life or of humanity.

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MHoydilla,

To some extent the forces you touch on were in effect in all civilizations in the past as well. Any society sophisticated enough and with access to good crops, domesticable animals, and temperate climate has a division of labor such that classes evolve who are not dependent on their own labor to produce food. Many primitive societies have had or developed such easy access to food as to have lived lives of almost complete leisure, free to spend their time developing complex mythologies to explain the world and why there is so much pain in it.

I have exactly 0 idea WTF you are getting at with points 1 and 2 at the end of your post, did you smoke a bowl of crazy immediately before writing them?

[DonkBluffer]

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People aren't going to read St. Augustine. People read Dan Brown and JK Rowling. Most people would eat a bug before they'd read one page of Kierkegaard or Ramana Maharshi or Plotinus or anything challenging and transcendant.

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[img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] Ramana Maharshi. And Nisargadatta Maharaj. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] (edit: I also like J.K. Rowling lol)

I was thinking yesterday about how we're actually just playtoys of our genes. Has it ever occurred to you guys how absurd it is that we think [censored] and asses are 'hot'? We think it's completely natural and obvious that we like them, liking them is even part of our identity, it makes us 'a man', while it really makes no sense at all.

We are tricked by our minds to believe that things actually have inherent meaning in them. While those 'meanings' are just processes in our brain/mind.

[Jeff W]

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Basically since the beginning of time life's main goal human/nonhuman has been to survive and procreate.

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I disagree with this. You ascribe a motive to evolution, but evolution doesn't have a goal any more than gravity does.

Why does an organism survive and procreate? Because the organisms that don't survive and procreate don't pass their genes on. That does not mean that there is any purpose to evolution.

[DonkBluffer]

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Basically since the beginning of time life's main goal human/nonhuman has been to survive and procreate.

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I disagree with this. You ascribe a motive to evolution, but evolution doesn't have a goal any more than gravity does.

Why does an organism survive and procreate? Because the organisms that don't survive and procreate don't pass their genes on. That does not mean that their is any purpose to evolution.

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My thoughts exactly.