Why Try?

...and the insignificance of the human race in the whole of the universe doesn't bother me or depress me, because we are all one and the same, we are all made of the same stuff and dependent on eachother and we are part of the universe, no matter how small a part. wow i'm getting spiritual how good is this? i don't do this much, must be the mushrooms i had last weekend. Very Happy

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mmm mushrooms, especially good with pizza :wink:

What do you guys think about the eternal life question though. Do you think humans wouldn't care about the meaning of life if it never ended.

What happens if aliens had come a couple hundred years ago planted chips in our brains to make them servants to us and keep the earth "running" for their benefit. We would never know. There are so many possible meanings of our life but i guess its best to live every day for yourself and make your own circumstances better.

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extra medium wrote:

Terry wrote:
What we do in this life matters to the beings with whom we share this world, and the ones who will come after us.

It makes no difference that the earth will be destroyed some day. The present moment is all we can ever experience anyway. It is worth making an effort because we what we do determines how we feel right now. Our actions also enhance or degrade the happiness and well-being of myriad life-forms that are aware of pleasure and pain, and IMO, the feelings of all sentient beings are paramount in the universe.

Our actions will affect the lives of our offspring and other beings for the foreseeable future: decades, centuries, maybe even millennia. Whether or not they know or remember us, the ripples our lives made in the fabric of their cosmos will linger. That is reason enough to try.

Dang Terry, I don't know.

This sounds almost like an afterlife of sorts also. In the Afterlife thread you said no afterlife.

My "actions will affect the lives of our offspring and other beings for the foreseeable future: decades, centuries, maybe even millennia. Whether or not they know or remember us, the ripples our lives made in the fabric of their cosmos will linger."????

See, I consider that a form of an afterlife. That is an afterlife in my book.

Maybe its just semantics again, perhaps we just have different definitions of afterlife.

By afterlife, I don't mean I necessarily have to be aware of this realm or floating around like a ghost or in heaven or hell or something, or remember my earthly name or identity, etc.

If my actions (my essence???) lives on for years or millenia after I die, I consider that an afterlife...

If afterlife merely means your actions live on, then everything has an afterlife. Everything affects everything else, not just people. Think about it: the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs (presumably) made human existence possible. Does that mean that asteroids have afterlives too? :wink:

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"life is the longest thing you will ever know". Wonderful, Benjamino. You are wise beyond your 20 years. I, an old man, like to say I will live forever, MY subjective forever, and that there is no "death", in the sense that there will be no "me" to be in a state of death (no subject, no predicate). A second after I die (a verb; "death" is a noun), I will return to the state "I" was in before birth. We always talk about afterlife but totally ignore beforebirth.

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JLNobody wrote:

We always talk about afterlife but totally ignore beforebirth.

Exactly. I was talking about this earlier on another thread. So much more attention is lavished on afterlife whereas people are completely content to ignore their priorbirth. I like your comment of "I will live forever", I'd never thought of it that way before and it makes an awful lot of sense. Thankyou for sharing that.

As for the topic as a whole:

Discreet, you're trying to find a logical purpose to life. I'm sorry but I'll spoil the surprise ending. There is none. Zero, whatsoever. Life has no logical purpose or reason to continue.

Emotionally though, there are some fantastic reasons. From delicious food to jiggling bosoms all the way through to the satisfaction of clear logical thought. These things vary from person to person, but in the end, the only logical thing to do is realise that your emotions are what give you purpose.

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Yes, indeed--"your emotions are what give you purpose." A joyful life is our purpose, our task. And we might even have more joy if we try to promote it in others' lives as well. But life itself is only opportunity for the construction of joy and meaningful action. We may have the instinct to remain alive under the most negative circumstances, but that is the occasion for seeking a meaning for continuing.

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If I play the question out honestly,...why not just kill yourself and get it over with? (which is a good question)

I'd have to say fear of the unknown, attachments to people and things here, and procrastination.

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Lash wrote:

If I play the question out honestly,...why not just kill yourself and get it over with? (which is a good question)

My answer to that is I don't feel like it is an option.

It seems like suicide is murder.

I mean, you are still killing a human being.

Yes, the human you are killing happens to be yourself.

But somehow I do not feel just because it happens to be me, I have a right to kill that body.

Hmmm....

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Maybe having the right to kill youself is true freedom?

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Lash wrote:

why not just kill yourself and get it over with?

Firstly, there isn't a reason to. In order to engage in a positive action one needs a reason to do so. So without any reason to commit suicide, the default is to not commit suicide.

Secondly is scheduling, I have a number of things that I want to do and even assuming that suicide were on the list it would be most rational to schedule it last since I couldn't perform anything on the schedule after it.

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Watchmakers, that was very clever. Smile

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JLNobody wrote:

Watchmakers, that was very clever.

Thankyou, logic has its uses.

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Discreet,
......You call life a blink of the eye, because you're so concerned about universe, and infinity. I give little concern about those things. Thre.s nothing I can do with that structure. My life is an eternity to me. I can never experience death, so I have no fear of that.
......What I try to do is keep in mind that man is by nature a pleasure seking animal. So I pursue pleasure wiihout shame. I treat people like I want be treated, and the love an respect I give, is mostly recipicol. I have been blessed enough to successfully make my own heaven on earth. I've done this by spending most of my life earning a comfortable living doing things I love.
......So please, my brother relax, and work on what you can control for the benifit f YOU, and the ones you love. your posting is so depressing, I'm concerned about you.

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Booman's signature: "Religion is a mystical interpretation of God; Science is an explanation of God."
I say (loosely), Science constructs empirically based interpretations ABOUT God; mysticism (a form of both religion and science) is direct experience OF God. (of course we are using the term, God, very broadly).
BTW, mysticism is not interpretive; it is experential, or it is nothing.

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