What is the meaning of Life?

[.Spectator]

That moment when your child asks you, “Mom, what’s the purpose of life if we’re all just going to DIE!”…………………………

[jakelafortParticipant]

That is the moment when he is no longer a child!

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

It’s what happens before then that has meaning and purpose.  What if someone dies very young?  Does their life have no meaning?

Meaning comes from having goals (sub-goals of ultimate goals) that things are then relevant to.

[StregaModerator]

Ask him what the point of a vacation is if you’re just going to go home afterwards 🙂

[jakelafortParticipant]

No point in cleaning up when my place is just gonna get dirty again.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Hi Belle! It think it is an indication of his first steps away from childhood. He has given it some thought and I suppose philosophers have pondered the same question for centuries. As Simon mentioned you need to differentiate between “purpose” and “meaning”. The purpose of life is to live it until it is over. Life can have any meaning you want it to have. It is up to each individual to decide what that is.

The purpose of life is certainly not to grovel before an imaginary god.

[.Spectator]

He’s also started crying almost every day about death. He’s coming to the realization that things die. It’s a pain I can’t take away from him. All I can do is hold him and say how much I love him and that yes, things die…but life is still beautiful. It’s really hard to watch him go through this knowing it’s his own journey…I’m not giving him all the answers, but just helping him find them for himself.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

It’s a stage we all go through.  The tragedy of life can be unbearable the first time we encounter it.  Over time, we learn to cope with it.  I think it took me years, it isn’t easy.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

For example, many moms must believe that providing for their child and trying to make them happy and successful is their purpose in life. If he had a pet he loved, taking good care of it could be a purpose.

Mother-nature wise, the purpose of life is to survive and create offspring. (I’m sure that’s not a fun or useful explanation for most kids.) Faced with that question from either of my kids (which I don’t don’t think I was), I think I’d tell them 1) it’s really up to you, and it depends mostly on what makes you happy, and 2) we’re lucky we have choices, because when we were designed by mother nature, our purpose in life was to just survive from day to day, rely on and help each other, and enjoy each other through thick and thin.

Now if they were otherwise consistently upset or unable to cope with such an abstract subject, I’d have to think more deeply not so much about how to give them an exact or truest answer to their question, but about what other issues they might have about themselves that are coming to the surface. Any kind of positive interaction should help, even if you don’t have a solid handle on what’s going on.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

Maybe he’s depressed.  The first time I got depressed, I spent the whole time asking, “what’s the point?”, presumably because my then-goals didn’t seem worthwhile (or rather, I didn’t have any).  What’s more, I felt it was impossible to get any or have any.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

“Mother-nature wise, the purpose of life is to survive and create offspring.”

– this carries the implication that it’s also to thrive, and to do this, we need to put the right conditions in place, do the right things, have the right attitudes etc.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I think it’s a healthy reality check for anybody.

My takeaway messages are: 1) make the most of life while we have it; 2) be grateful that we have it at all.

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