Ask HN: What's the Point of Life?

It’s good that you have enough free time to raise such questions))

But seriously, to understand why you’d never get true objective answer you need to realize something.

The question itself contains 2 critical assumptions:

1. There’s objective cause-effect relationship embedded in the nature of reality (and therefore life).

Imagine there’s no causality and all you see is just a correlation of events of different levels of certainty.

Would this question make sense at all?

And causality is nothing more than a model of the world in our human minds. A very good and practical one, but just a model.

How do you expect to get good answer to a question outside of the model scope, but which make sense only within the model.

2. We as humans somehow can know or impose some ultimate goal for the life itself as though we were the ones who invented it in the lab.

While in reality we’re just observers and a tiny piece of life we know of.

We have no real control of the process itself, and we’ll never know how it really started unless someone external will show us.

But then still we will have no reference point to know for sure if this someone is not just another form of the same life trying to fool us. Etc.

So anyway, this question (in its ultimate form) is deeply meaningful, because it implies the answer which lies outside of the system making the question possible in the first place.

Answer “there’s no point” is also wrong. For the same reasons. May be there is. May be someone created it on purpose, but again we will never know this for sure, at least with existing methods of “knowing”

That might be true in the abstract, as a theory. But when it comes to point-of-life I think it’s better to judge a philosophy based on how a person has lived it. And it doesn’t seem like Watts lived as good of a life as he could.

escape life, or the point of life (if there's one)?

i don't think there's a point of life. from a nature perspective it should be reproduce and assure balance in the ecosystem, but as there's way too many humans that ship has sailed.

from the economic perspective you're a pawn to contribute to a "healthy" economy so we all can enjoy our luxuries.

and then there's the individual perspective, where the point probably is what you want it to be.

after realising there's no point at all, for me the point pretty much is "do what you want and what you're comfortable with and try not to worry too much"

When I was younger I was a big fan of existentialism. "Life has no prescribed inherent meaning, it is whatever you want it to be!" seemed very freeing.

Then I suffered a disability and came upon the realization similar to Helen Macdonalds, in H is for Hawk:

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.

You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, [...]"

In an effort to adapt to this, I clung to stoicist philosophy. Life is to be weathered, through the development of virtues, and above all else--realizing what you have control over, and what you do not.

Upon becoming homeless, I realized this wise and practical branch of philosophy had not exactly delivered on it's promises. You cannot be destitute, sick, and isolated, and still manage to be happy, despite Stoicist claims to the contrary. This branch of philosophy oddly seems entitled to me now--little wonder it grew popular with intelligentsia, emperors, and now tech CEOs. I grew to far prefer its philosophical progenitor, Cynicism.

For this phase of my life, Albert Camus resonates and brings comfort. Life is absurd. The challenge is not to unravel or create meaning for life, but to image personal happiness in a stochastic world that defies explanation (though some such explanation may indeed exist, it is certainly absurd to human minds. I envy the dismissive confidence of those that proclaim "no point!")

This philosophy has served me far better than the others, though who knows what will come in the twilight of my life. Life is strange, fellow travelers.

There is no point. There is only one point. There are as many points as you can make up. Choose any of these.

Life’s point is to live, and the inherent hope of all* life (regardless of species) is for life to thrive way beyond the term of one individual.

*: Caveats apply.