Ask HN: What's the Point of Life?

a quote from the tv show bojack horseman: "The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn't a search for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead."

To glorify God.

That's the standard Sunday School answer. It doesn't work for everybody, of course. But for the right kind of believer, it answers the question.

Beyond Sunday School, there are a number of different elaborations.

The one I empathize the most with at the moment is that the universe is a crucible meant to prove what is eternal and what is fleeting. You put in a hunk of metal and get out pure gold through a process of burning and discarding all the fleeting things, which necessarily leaves only the eternal.

Therefore for everyone there has to come a death, otherwise you would not be fully tested in all things.

What is left after that testing is God's life within us, but now a fully tested life that has overcome (or persisted through) everything, including death. It is this gold that glorifies God. So suffering and loss are a crucial part of life, which maybe helps explain why we spend most of our life in our declining years and why those years are the most important, as opposed to many other animals that die not long after reaching maturity.

You're supposed to be old and wander around, asking these types of questions!

I'd like to add a small point not mentioned in many other comments. The rational, conscious part of the human experience is actually pretty small. Jonathan Haidt calls it the "rider that tries to control the elephant". It is good to occasionally have experiences that are outside the usual rational thinking of daily life. It helps the "rider" remember that the elephant also exists and that it acts on different levels than just logic and conscious thought. In fact, we mostly just use logic to try to explain what the "elephant" already figured out intuitively. It's good to try to listen to it.

The best idea I've found so far:

"The meaning of life is to give life meaning." ‒ Viktor Frankl

It's simple, actionable, positive, personalizable, non-confessional, practical.