What's the point of life and continuing to live?

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  • Ah, good old existential angst.

    The fact is that there is no point to life. There is no preordained role in the world that you're meant to fulfil. You do not have a certain destiny. A random combination of genes results in us being born, we live for a while and experience a largely random selection of stuff, and then we die. It's up to each of us to figure out the meaning of our existence for ourselves. Quite a few people find that idea so daunting that they outsource determining the purpose of their life to their parents, an ancient religious text, the words of doubtful wisdom of a celebrity, the consensus view of the people they spend time with or whatever. Any of those things _can_ work, but they don't necessarily result in you enjoying the journey.

    One of the biggest problems with depression is that it sucks you down into an endless cycle of hopelessness. You can't see the point of living and life just generally sucks, so you have no motivation to try to figure it out. Only you can decide if you really want to get out of that ever-downward spiral, and start to take some little steps to achieve that. For what it's worth, I've read that there's some decent research which supports the idea that simply making an effort to regularly spend time in a natural environment can help people begin to claw their way back to a connection with the world. I also strongly believe that doing _something_ creative every day has a positive effect on our mental health. And it doesn't have to be something stereotypically "creative" like writing a novel or painting a picture. Cooking a new dish you've never attempted before, stacking a pile of rocks into a wobbly spire on a beach, renovating a piece of second-hand furniture or doing your best to sketch a favourite scene all count.

    Oh, and if you believe that what you need to make you feel better about yourself, your life and the world in general is some guy in your life, I'd suggest that you think again. Being emotionally close to someone who cares about us can be beneficial to our self-image and mental health, but it's very difficult to maintain a positive relationship with another person when we don't really like the person we are and we don't see any point in our continued existence.

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    • But Booj. Yes there is no point to life. But adaptive life continues into the future by natural selection. Non-adaptive life does not.

      By default then, we can see that ultimately life will fill all voids thru randomness. It is a very insignificant purpose of life, but logic confirms it.

      BTW, you’re one of the few people here that could understand this line of reasoning.

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