Life Has No Meaning. It Just Is.

There is no meaning to life. The choices we make form the direction our life takes and the path we follow. There is a cause and effect relationship between choices we make and what happens next.

I wonder if some people think that there is a little gnome sitting somewhere with a ledger who will look up their account for them and tell them what they are supposed to be doing.

What we do is the result of our free will. Let's agree that a person is born with a talent for musical ability or is keenly interested in art or science or baseball.

What a person does with those talent potentials and preferences is to refine them into skills. If you ended up doing art, it is because you like it and you spent more time learning how to do it well. Same for everyone else. Whatever it is that they enjoy doing they took the time to learn about it and apply it.

That then, is still a product of a free will decision.

My reference to a gnome with a ledger was intended to use a little humor to make my point. To me, the notion that there is a meaning to anyone's life implies that someone is assigning meanings to each individual, such as "You will be a plumber, you will be a doctor, you will be a pottery maker, you will be a musician, you will be a whatever."

Clearly, that is not true. How many people, for instance, were encouraged to be in a particular business or profession, but they choose to do something different? How many people were perfectly content doing their job until their company shut down or got taken over, reorganized and they got laid off and now they have to do something else?

Aside from work, is our meaning determined by whether we have children? Some people choose to have several, some choose to have one. Some people choose not to have any. What does that mean?

Is meaning related to a choice of religion? Obviously many people choose to change religions or not to belong to any. Is meaning related to our choice of hobbies or the charities we support? People change these during the course of a lifetime too. All of these are free will choices too.

In each case, free will choice determines the outcome. So, no, there is no purpose or meaning to life. We are born and then we decide what to do with that life. Life just is, it does not mean anything. We assign meanings to things.