The Meaning of Life - You are quite incredible just as you are

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I just read an article discussing the existential problem most people have with the meaning of life. I have some ideas about this. if you ever doubted your own miserable existence, this may cheer you up and give you reason to wonder at just how incredible the opportunity you have been given by having a free pass to reality. I think the answers to why we're here and how to extract meaning lie not in the concept of freedom and immortality but in what can you learn and what can you contribute towards the future.

Accumulation & Transformation

What you accumulate in knowledge (however that manifests) and how can you change the world, (even in small ways), leave it more enriched than when you entered it. Many artists appreciate this simple fact, scientists and engineers also. I think it's a major component or key to thrive. Parents often feel it. People strive to discover this in so many different ways. Doctors and nurses appreciate this, all manner of therapists do. They help others, as do vets, conservationists, environmentalists, even a banker can help someone; start a business, buy a home. Anyone with an awareness of what they do to contribute, (coders included) can discover a simple realisation of an even simpler truth. To escape the velocity of one's own ego and find meaning in being through yoga, meditation..cooking, playing the flute, whatever allows you to step outside yourself. Actors know this perhaps more than anyone and are all the more vulnerable for it.

Alchemy & The Philosophers Stone

The Alchemist's holy grail of finding the philosopher's stone to transmute lead into gold is a metaphor for the transformation of the base metal of your soul into finding it's higher purpose and thus meaning, hopefully a sense of peace with oneself, the environment and maximising the potential of your short individual but potentially potent life. Incidentally, it may be you who learns to harness the power of the stars to turn lead into gold.

Character

You are a character in a thousand people's lives, not the star of your own reality TV show. When you make this realisation, the meaning of life the universe and everything becomes clear. You are a living part of the universe, albeit bounded in small blue ball somewhere way out west, you are part of an unbroken existence of a history which stretches all the way back to the big bang 13.8billion years ago (at the very least)

Evolution

You have evolved from nothing into hot plasma, cooled into matter, condensed into matter, compounded into molecules, folded into proteins, bounded yourself into the complex chemistry of cells. All the way, gathering more and more consciousness from the merest mote of awareness of heat, light, movement to full blown self aware, critical thinking, observing your own historical fact of existence. If you choose to and you are lucky, you will pass all of this through the sheer fact of MAKING LOVE - children, the ultimate expression of all that is and all that can be in our universe. everything that joins us from past to future.

Probability 1

Every single one of your uncounted TRILLIONS of ancestors faced down the most incredible challenges of existence to pass it on to you, many more did not. The chances you being alive and reading this in the whole history of existence are so incredibly and remotely small you would struggle to count the zeros of probability.

Forged in the Heart of Stars

We have all been forged in the death of stars, 1000's of times bigger than our own sun with so much power and force that we could not come anywhere near to really feeling it's magnificence and significance. Your atoms have travelled from other galaxies to be you. They have undoubtedly existed in other consciousness at other times in other places, perhaps as a thinking living breathing being, far away in a galaxy a long time ago

You are amazing, you are a one-off, you will never exist again. spend your time wisely. Leave something positive behind, have compassion and if you can, help others to find their own path. We no longer need religion to gives our lives meaning and structure, we have cosmology.

images = Hubble courtesy of NASA public domain galleries