What is the Meaning of Life?

Do You Know the Meaning of Life?

I do. There isn’t one! Shocked? Now that that’s out of the way. Let me explain why. The Universe was created from nothing, or quite possibly something. We don’t know what there was before it happened, multiple theories abound about parallel universes, 11 dimensions but I digress.

What we do know is that since the Big Bang, the Universe has followed a predictable rulebook that repeats itself ad infinitum and will continue to do so until maximum entropy (heat death) of the Universe. This predictable rule is an increase in the complexity of matter. From Hydrogen through to the other 91 naturally occurring elements on the periodic table.

This same increase in complexity is how evolution has also progressed; from single-celled organisms to the 50 trillion celled Ape cousin writing this. So the question remains, if everything around us is predictable to a certain extent, how can there be a meaning of life? It wasn’t magic or spontaneous, but inevitable, and with an estimated 2 billion Earth-like planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone, and at least 100 billion other galaxies in the observable Universe, you can bet a fat kid some cake that there is life elsewhere.

Life just is. The Universe doesn’t operate on our needs or wants, or biases and prejudices, or our hopes and aspirations. It just does, and it just is. We can try to make sense of how the Universe operates, the hows and the whats, but never the why. We will never get a 3rd party perspective on the Universe because we can never go out and look back in. Even if we could, we might only find other Universes further pushing the question into the realm of impossibility.

Therefore, the question may as well not exist.

Now just because there isn’t a general meaning of life, doesn’t mean there can’t be a personal meaning of life. In the words of Carl Sagan “We are the custodians of Life’s meaning”. Life is not without meaning provided you see in yourself, a purpose to your own life.