11 January 2016

The Meaning of Life, Living, and Being Alive

One day I will go to sleep and I won't ever wake up again.
Whenever that is I want to make sure I've lived a life being happy and making others happy.

There is no God or afterlife. There is no soul that lives on after us. We are life that has just happened to occur on a tiny spec of dust in a near infinitely sized universe, that has evolved far enough to have consciousness, a deep understanding, free will, and a conscience. That gives us no right over the millions of life forms and sub species of every human before us to have also had a soul. A soul cannot be born or evolved: everything that makes us human is bound by matter. We just got shoved with a complex brain with an embedded deep requirement and desire for meaning and reasoning that makes us want to live forever.

Religion was created as a psychological safety net to protect us from the truth, paranoia, fear and existentialism of how alone and unimportant we are in the universe. It seems like a betrayal that we are forced to live a life and make choices and we get nothing out of it after we die. It's truly scary to think we won't be alive anymore. Religion was created as a way of controlling people before politics and science existed. It's just a way of life as someone tried to immortalise themselves and their thoughts.

The best we can do is how that we've had a good and happy life and done the best at doing so, having never wasted our time. I imagine being on your deathbed, old, surrounded by the people that love you. Or it could literally happen any day, you'll never ever wake up or have a consciousness again. You get 90 years to live safely and healthily and then you're done, like a sand timer.

Your life right now is just one part of the story of humanity. There have been over a 100 billion people ever alive, and look how far we've come from our tree-dwelling ancestors, and then from dinosaurs. Look how far we've come from the first specs of life as oil bubbles. Your life is part of a wave, a cog in a machine, it's one ball of water in a river that is carving and eroding out a new part of the same river - it's constantly creating a new river in history and the riverbed of time. You've just been dropped into a segment of our history of life that's been going on for billions of years, at a stage where there are billions of us on the planet and we've developed intelligence and free thought beyond any of our counterpart species. We are alone in species because there is none other that has multiple languages or millions of words and interpretations. Words were created to allow us to depict and manipulate reality: to bend it to our will. No other species does it better in the eventual job of basically moving matter around the planet, and into space all that humans may occupy it. We are skeletons in bags of bacteria with a conscious brain trapped and carefully plugged into it that controls the rest of the body. It's our purpose to use that body as best we can, we've only got one of them.

Because we are alone and not able to communicate with any other species of life, we make more of ourselves to communicate with instead. We should try and meet as many people as wet can to try and never be alone when we die: we want someone to care about us. Although being alone is a good time for reflection and creativity to count towards the portfolio of your life.

We shouldn't be negative or make the experience any worse for anyone. No suffering should ever deliberately be created, but it cannot be avoided altogether. It's never on anyone's grounds to make the lives of others worse. Bullying, and harm to others is against the right of others to do good in this world.

The meaning of life (why does life exist) is to survive, to prevail. Even survive the universe if we can.
The meaning of living (why do we exist) is to change/influence/inspire the world for the better, to leave something of us behind (children, art, whatever is our baby) that follows our footsteps, in our likeness, and continues to improve upon us. A part of a continuity on how to lead your life (what instructions, values, morals and beliefs you have) that allow you to continue on the same story every parent before you has been telling.
The meaning of being alive (why do you exist) is to be happy (thanks to the work of others in bringing you food and entertainment), make others happy, and harmonise the two aspects above into a story that others can follow. It's a two part exchange. You are receiving that happiness/goodness of others and you need to make happiness/goodness for others.

I want you to wake up every day and know exactly what your plan is. How are you going to help the world today. Aside from meta stuff like food and clothes and a shelter and cleaning etc, how are you going to be the best you can be today. Don't get distracted or procrastinate or be lazy or stare into your screen. Have at least 3 things to do every day. Of course give yourself a break once in a while too.

Listen to the bells in your head. Stop and think before you respond at all. Think about others and how best to help them. Really try and understand what people want. If you have to do other stuff in the way because you're eccentric, take your own time out to do it.

Don't be selfish or think of your own needs.