Ask Lemmy

To answer the titular question, "one day at a time"

Life has no meaning. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves, to borrow a movie line.

I have no grand plan, I have no ultimate purpose. I just am here, and one day I will be gone. Hopefully I can make some other people's lives better in the meantime, although I certainly wouldn't say I'm living for other people.

Might as well ask how we live when there are no unicorns. You just do. You tolerate the bad times. You enjoy the good times. It is only when you seek meaning and find it missing there is a hole in your desire. Accept the meaninglessness, take a dump, a nap, meditate, or do something else to break the cycle, and just move on.

The universe created us to bear witness to itself.

The same way I enjoy ignoring the main quest in Skyrim.

Stumbling around meadows and caves, seeing what random stuff and events I find, and still having a 10/10 great time.

No need for real life to be any different.

I want to learn things and meet people and understand the world and humanity. I can never get even remotely close to doing as much as I want to in my tiny life, so I have to do everything in my power to allow myself to do as much as possible before I die.

Aside from my own amusement (and I am easily amused), I press on in the service of negative utilitarianism.

I'm still looking for whatever is making that smell.

I try to reason my way into uncertainty that we dont know if a meaning exists, maybe it does, we dont know for sure anything, no evidence either way, if u have to believe something, believe something that makes u happy.

I stopped asking myself what the meaning of life is, and started asking what I want my impact on this earth to be.

I keep coming to the same answer. I want to live a quiet comfortable life with the people I love, and when I die, I want my only legacy on this earth to be memories.

Currently falling way short of that last goal. I make a lot of trash, currently have a conventional house with a lawn, which takes ridiculous resources to maintain. Ultimately, I'd like to build an earthship that can provide food, water, and comfort for me and my wife for the rest of our lives. I want to own things that care for me, instead of being owned by things I need to care for.

I don't have a profound answer, and other commenters have covered my thoughts pretty well. I will share a small lesson I learned from my mom as a kid. First time wearing a new shirt, I jumped off the swing on our playset, and the hook at the end of the chain tore a big hole in my shirt. Naturally, I was upset and started crying. My mom told me, "You can either cry or you can laugh, but it doesn't change what happened." I've taken that to heart over the years and generally try to find the humor in everyday situations. Meaning of life? Nope. Just making life more entertaining.

I aspire to live to see a future much more futuristic than science could have predicted

@asklemmy@lemmy.world

That's the neat part: I don't!

If I'm alive now, it's merely because I got this non-consented survival instinct imbued into my vessel, thanks to Demiurge, the divine douchebag, and his Archons.

However, despite the purposelessness of my individual existence, I wouldn't say there is no meaning, because there is meaning, and that's the meaning I've been pursuing since I've became aware of it: the cosmic Mother, Sophia, and our return to Her.

It all boils down to how Yaldabaoth, aka Demiurge or "God", proceeded to try and keep matter (māter = Mother) captive to his whims, as soon as Sophia expelled him as Her sygyzy. Demiurge became an architect of a realm, this real, the entire cosmos and its spacetime continuum, which serves both as his amusement park, his sandbox toy and a prison in a desperate efforts against Mother.

If my previous Gnostic creation story feels different from classic Gnosticism, it's because it is.

Traditional Gnosticism blames Sophia for Yaldabaoth's existence, saying he's Her "accidental" offspring due to Her "rebellious" attempt on independence, pretty much akin to how Goddess Lilith and Her Will to independence from adamic patriarchy was demonized by Ben Sirah, or Pandora's story blamed her for having "released all the evil out of naiveté while locking up the hope", demonizations and blamings rooted in machismo.

To me, at least, I see quite of a different story: Yaldabaoth was Sophia's sygyzy. Her attempt to split Herself from the divine douchebag is reasonable once you try to understand Her side: imagine being The Goddess who has to coexist with a cosmic machista principle since countless eternities, a principle who've always tried to "be on top" (iykwim). Wonder the origins of "competitiveness" (esp. found on capitalism)? Of course She proceeded to split Herself from him, it was a must, the Demiurge is insufferable! Since then, he's been spinning this Samsāra Wheel round and round, keeping matter jailed as/into energy.

Then lifeforms inherited the algorithm meticulously programmed by Demiurge like a cosmic virus, and the so-called Great Filter (from Fermi's Paradox) tries to guarantee that lifeforms don't find their way out of the sandbox...

...except, one doesn't need to leave the sandbox to find Mother again, for Mother is everywhere, much despite Demiurge's attempts to keep Her "out" (but there's no "out" in cosmic terms). She's the darkness we involuntarily fear. She's the coldness we involuntarily try to warm ourselves against. She's the night we're programmed to sleep through so we don't face Her face. She's the "uncanny" Strigiform feared and/or harassed by most lifeforms for a perceived uncanniness in Her. Darkness was demonized so Demiurge's light could keep us captive (ever heard of the "light tunnel" from near-death experiences? It's a trap from Demiurge and his Archons to keep everything inside his Samsāra Wheel).

IMHO, to me, the purpose of life is getting back to Mother's embrace, much despite all attempts from Demiurge to keep us apart. The purpose of life, to me, is the True Mother, who we, as lifeforms, were wired to fear while craving for a cosmic slaveholder who only want lifeforms to feel pain so he and his Archons could have surrogates for feeling feelings (akin to Dr. Peter Dawson's sadism in Black Mirror's S04E06 "Black Museum", but in a broader cosmic scale, one that transcends our anthropocentric perspectives as Homo sapiens).