What is the meaning of life?

Question

What is the meaning of life?
Im and ive yet to figure out the meaning of life?

Answer

Life actually does have an intrinsic meaning, but to get to it were going to have to progress a little sideways. So bear with me...brbrBefore we can talk about the meaning of life, I think its productive to first ask the question, quotWhat IS life?quot. This is a bit easier to answer, if not perfectly clear, because biologists obviously have to be able to explain what, exactly, the bio part of their name refers to.brbrBiologists themselves often approach the question backwards. Instead of defining life as a whole, they instead consider the number of things that we generally consider to be alive and figure out what qualities they all seem to have in common. This gives us a handful of properties that all living things we know of seem to have, including growth, reproduction, and the ability to make longterm adaptations to the environment.brbrOkay. So what does that MEAN? Again I think we need to break down our question with another one quotWhat IS meaning?quot Ill take the same approach as the biologists on this one and consider examples. If a boulder fell on someones house, and one observer asked another, quotWhat does that mean?quot, what would acceptable answers be? I can think of a number of them quotIt means that was a bad place to build a housequot, and what they seem to have in common are that they describe greater implications and intent. Or in other words, given the event, process, or object, what will happen in the future, what led to it in the past, and what effects and intents does it have in the present?brbrSo what does life do? It changes things. We know from the definition of life that it grows, consumes, spreads, alters its environment and alters the ways in which it does all these things. Having living things around means things are going to be different later, and probably were different before. Any time we imagine a place where nothing is ever different the only way that image works is to make it completely devoid of life. So that is something.brbrBut its not everything. Life doesnt produce just ANY change, but a certain flavour of it. Simply put, living things want to live. The changes living things make, generally speaking, either help them do so or kill them off. So life is not just about change, but change ideally for the better, even if practically it falls short sometimes.brbrThis, then, must be the meaning of life. To change for the better.brbrCuriously enough, a quick survey of major philosophies, religions, and systems reveals that almost all of them seem to integrate this concept. Change for the better. There may be other important things, as some of the above systems would suggest, but to change for the better is, at least, is the one thing implied by the very nature of the way things are. So do it!