does the pointlessness of your life bother you?

[KurtSF]

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What compels wild animals to have sex?

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when they have sex, little animals get made. then we can see the little animals bone each other and ask questions about it. there are plenty of animals that never have sex, we don't talk or think about them very often.

our world is made up of things that procreate.

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Try "procreating" without eating.

There are plenty of animals that never eat. They die and we don't talk or think about them very often. Our world is made up of things that eat. Therefore the meaning of life is eating.

QED, bitches!

[Duke]

The void of purpose gives us a hell of a lot of room to create whatever purpose we want. They have a word for people who can't handle that: communists.

[The Bride]

There's nothing about evolution that gives life meaning.

It's a process that favors certain ways of organizing matter over others, but ultimately it's as doomed to failure as any other process that opposes entropy.

However, we are animals and our brains are wired so that we experience things that enhance our survival or reproductive prospects as pleasurable. So having kids provides us with some measure of pleasure - we satisfy our biological imperative.

There's no meaning in any of that though. And yeah, the pointlessness of it all does bother me, irrespective of whether I'm happy or sad.

[Morrek]

Life does not have a reason, save for what you give it

[w_alloy]

Evolution is an explanation for life, not necessarily a meaning. Survival and procreation have been the driving forces of people for most of our species' existence, but over the last thousands of years this has become trivial.

The vast majority of people believe whatever is most convenient to them. For most people, this is religion. Whenever I read a conversion story, like Barak Obama's, I am always somewhat appalled at how blatant this is. The thing is, this applies to many agnostic atheists too at least to some extent, and I think this is perfectly fine and ok. By far the largest example of this in my opinion is how most people who view life as meaningless (in an absolute sense) view morals, but this is a different debate.

I bring this up because if life really is meaningless, than the fact that it is meaningless is somewhat irrelevant. If there is nothing greater to live for, we should just do whatever we want. But this IS what people do. People add meaning because it make their lives more enjoyable and tolerable, and there is nothing wrong with that.

I think a lot of the opinions in this thread are correct, in that ideally meaningless shouldn't bother people. But it bothers me, and it always has, and it has contributed to my depression whether people like KKF believe me or not. I often wish I could just believe in some religion, or that I enjoyed life in and of itself enough not to worry about meaning at all (which I think is the case for most of the people in this thread, and the true heart of the "people just say this because they are depressed" comment, which is a half-truth). But this is not the case for me, and I will continue to struggle with meaninglessness, probably until I overcome depression and/or have kids.

[EmpireMaker2]

Thats why drugs are on earth

[guids]

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the pointlessness of life is the GOOD thing about it

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I agree. life is fairly pointless so there is no use in being reserved or timid etc, because what are the consequences? not much imo.

[hicherbie]

also remember that a human life span was prob around 30 years before modern medicine. im pretty sure i wouldn't have time to be depressed if i had to grow up, have kids and take care of them until adulthood in a truncated timeline.

we are "wired" to be dead before this becomes an issue.

[highhustla]

The fact that I essentially believe life to be "pointless" (e.g. I just want to feel good while I'm waiting to die) does not bother me at all; it is part of my world-view.

The actual pointlessness of my current surroundings bothers me, however, and I'm going to do something about it (e.g. find a new dayjob, take a shot at my ebiz).

On a tangent related to the OP: I think it's interesting how humans tend to project their current feelings (even fleeting ones) onto a much larger scale of their whole life ("why do I ALWAYS feel like this???"), when actually, it's just a small emotional downswing on a graph that probably looks like a poker graph.

[bruin]

If anything, it's the pointlessness of my life that makes me happy.