Ask HN: What is the ultimate meaning of life?
...and how to best achieve it?
The overall effect is very much like "knowing the meaning of life" although the implementation is a lot more "I no longer care whether life has a meaning or not. Whatever this is this is fine."
Hard to describe the "no longer needing an answer" - it is a very distinct thing. Not at all the same as having the question answered.
What is success?
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
I think because it expressed something that I've felt but could never quite articulate - that there isn't one big well-defined reason for living but a bunch of little reasons that are all worthwhile.
If we acquire the right "bits", we get drawn out of the black hole at the end of the experiment. If we don't, we get left in to ultimately break down into Hawking Radiation. Hell is being left behind, not eternal torment just eventual complete subsumption into entropic decay.
This would explain a lot of things. Miracles? Just tweaking the experiment. Jesus? Sent in to provide some sort of data export connection between the two levels. Original sin? We took on some value or aspect that complicated or corrupted the data export, making us both less and more valuable but requiring a "filter" (presumably death) to determine which data exports have value for the project.
Actual sins? Probably actions that decrease the value of your data, or decrease the value of others' data.
It's all hooey and stuff I imagined, my religious fanfic, so to say, but it's an interesting thought to me and I felt like sharing it, so enjoy.
I think this provides a very interesting opposing force to dogma.
It also enables you to easily one-up conspiracy theorists when you encounter them. One-uping them is a wonderful strategy of dealing with someone who insists on being divorced from scientific reality.
So what does death mean to you? There's lots of frameworks for this, pick one that fits.
In the past, we had bushido, chivalry, martyrdom, Valhalla, and that the best way to die was in battle. You don't need faith for this, but it helps. But going into battle and having like a 50% chance of death, that's one way to be in full control of your life. You could say that dying to prevent your kin from being looted and tortured, that's as meaningful as it got.
Some people believe that we're all waves in the same ocean. I believe it might have been Seneca but there's also a few others. We're just a collection of energy. An ant is not sentient, but ant colony has the complexity and possible sentience. But it's just a bundle of energy, a system that manages energy.
Our bodies are similar. Farms are like power plants, they convert energy from one form into another that's broken down by humans, for the cells. And humans convert that energy into something else. Humans build cities and rockets. Cells build humans. We're part of a system in a way that cells are part of us. A city holds a form of sentience, probably similar to an ant colony, but different to humans and animals. And so when we die, our energy is just returned to the universe, recycled by other little animals. Some people think your consciousness can be reincarnated as animals, but what if you can be reincarnated as a city? Who knows how this consciousness thing works? But if you want to find out about that, listen to stories from people who have nearly or temporarily died or those who had a stroke and had their brain totally break apart. They're surprisingly consistent.
For some, death is the afterlife. God and Karma give us a KPI and our role, as humans, is to meet it as best we can. God, being omniscient, knows the right things to put in that KPI, so all we do is just serve God fully. You'd trust that God is smarter and knows what's best for you. Humility is a prerequisite, where people finally admit that they don't know and ask for a higher power to guide them.
Anyway, this is just an example of how far you can get when you flip the question around and ask what the meaning of death is.
"Your personalized Meaning of Life" comes to you when you choose the path that makes you truly happy and loved. A hard lesson is realizing that money, fame, status are only transient feel happy moments.
This is achieved through the mastery of self-control gained during the experience of wisdom or enlightenment (the self-reliant demonstration of one's growth in knowledge). This will necessarily lead one to be considerate of the world and its harmonious ordering extending itself into human society and its inter-generational endurable record-keeping which acts as a positive feedback loop in construction higher measures of harmony (peace and balance) between ourselves, according more fun and eradicating misery.
Simply being, more human agreement is the goal of Nature. The more one can promote it, the better one’s reality will be - because it is truly living. It breeds a sense of self-certainty about one’s movement which ends the originally query.
—Alan Watts
-- Kurt Vonnegut
Meaning is dependent on what you do.
The ultimate meaning? Such redundancy! Meaning shifts as the waves in the ocean. I assure you that meaning will change as you grow older.
But now, let’s explore this question of how to achieve the ultimate meaning of life. Maybe you want an answer from Zen? The way to achieve is to achieve it. You see, there’s no other way of doing a thing than by doing it. You cut potatoes by cutting potatoes. You can’t cut them by brushing your hair.
What is the meaning you want to achieve? Figure that out and do it. How? Do as musicians do. Live for the music. For every note. Don’t hurry to the end because the point of music is to be in the moment and enjoy the melody.
What answers have you already found?
What work have you already done?
Reading the Bible is a good place to start.
Either God exists or He doesn’t. Your decision about which part of that statement is true, can only be taken by faith. No logical proof can convince you of either.
1) At 19 yo I was a college drop-out and living a double-life by dealing drugs at night and working in a chiropractor's office by day. At the lowest point in my life (that season) one day I was working at the office and began to feel terrible conviction for all bad things I'd ever done. I felt so bad that I went to lay down in a bed near closing time, the office manager, a Christian, came over and felt like praying for me. Intense story shortened: I felt the presence of God fill up the room, and the office manager was telling me during prayer "let Jesus take your sins", while in my mind I was thinking "no way I can let an innocent person take on all the bad things I've done", I theb heard a clear voice in my head saying "I already died for your sins, so you might as well let me take them from you". I couldn't argue against that, and when I let go it became a life-changing moment for me because I felt all guilt in life gone, and suddenly innocent again (forgiven). It changed my entire life radically, even my family and closest friends could tell the difference. There were no drugs involved in that experience at all.
After that, experiences include things like:
2) Having visions of things that would then happen. Minor things, not world-changing events. For example: I'd be praying, and start having a vision (vivid day-dream) of me meeting a person who would then share X problem with me, and me offering prayer, and them crying when I prayed, and that event play out just as I saw it a few hours later. It would be like me watching a movie and knowing what to do next because I had already seen it. "Ok, I'm supposed to pray for them, and they're going to start crying and have a life-changing moment." Would happen exactly as I saw it.
3) I once traveled on vacation to Machu Pichu in Peru, made a 2-day pit stop at Cusco (their ancient capital). The window of my hotel room had a view of another building which had an eye of Horus painting with an advertisement for prostitutes. The next night, after praying with barely any effort/intensity I heard a voice telling me "Go now!". Sounds crazy but I got dressed immediately, went out to the streets, and immediately kept hearing a voice as I walked, at midnight, down the streets of this strange city towards places I'd never been to before. I kept hearing instructions on when to turn right or left, and wondered if I was being led to something having to do with that eye of Horus. Well, eventually I found myaelf walking down an unlit street and getting the sense I was near, then came across a big house with big wooden doors, with the eye of Horus symbol on both sides. I felt like simply like praying over that place (I dod try knocking and no one opened). After a while I felt like I was done, walked out a different way and somehow found myself back at the hotel. I heard in my mind "mission accomplished." How can I walk, at midnight, down the steets of an ancient city thinking I'm going to end up in a property related to the eye of Horus, and actually end up there, only to walk back a different way and be back at my hotel? And I'm not talking about a 5 minute walk here.
4) I went to medical school to glorify God through medicine. When I applied for medical school I experienced a state of ecstasy for hours which I won't describe here. The first weekend on medical school campus I was going on a hike before church that morning, and asked God to show me that He was with me by leading me to read from the Bible what was going to be preached at church that morning. I heard "1 Peter 1". I got to the top of the hill I hiked, began to read that chapter, and my mind got busy daydreaming about the chapter. I looked at my watch and thought "Darn it, I have to get going...I only read the first 4 verses." When I got to church, the teacher (the pathology professor, haha) opened by saying "Today I'm going to share from 1 Peter 1, verses 1-4." Well, I'm either totally making these things up, or I'm not.
I could share more, like my meeting my wife, and so on, but I'll stop for now :)
These are select experiences over a decade. Certainly not my daily life, and on a daily basis you'd find I'm quite a grounded, logical person who prefers facts over emotions. But I have lived them, and I'm sure I'm not the only one full of such stories. They are what makes my faith, to me, logically true by means of many undeniable experiences that defy random chance. But it all began with nothing more than blind faith.
Find a problem that interests you and try to solve it.
God loves museums and art galleries, and she often hangs around them, sipping a cup of coffee (one cream, two sugars).
Viktor Frankl's book is pretty good too. https://www.amazon.com/Mans-Search-Meaning-classic-Holocaust...
"Best" is subjective.