[Serious] What gives your life meaning?

[Brian37]

That is literally why they broke up in the early 80s. They didn't want to be on stage today looking like that.

[Shell B]

I'm not sure my life has meaning. You couldn't put a sentence next to "Shell's life" in the dictionary to define it. Different things give me hope and motivation on a day-to-day basis, if that can be considered meaning. Family, pets, hobbies are probably the top most important things. They make my life meaningful, in a manner of speaking.

[Cepheus Ace]

tasty food, soft warm bed and pillow, video games, music, stories.

[EgoDeath]

I'm not sure my life has meaning. You couldn't put a sentence next to "Shell's life" in the dictionary to define it. Different things give me hope and motivation on a day-to-day basis, if that can be considered meaning. Family, pets, hobbies are probably the top most important things. They make my life meaningful, in a manner of speaking.

Those things certainly qualify. I don't think it needs to be some huge, overarching, cosmic meaning... just things that are meaningful to you. I think I'd be pretty surprised to hear of an atheist who thinks life has some cosmic meaning... though I'm sure they exist.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Treating people how they deserve to be treated.  This means I behave nicely towards nice people, but pricks tend to get a response in kind (for the record, the overwhelming majority of people I've met are in the first group).

Boru

[Little lunch]

I been sat here five minutes now and no answer from the noggin.
Can life be meaningful in lots of little ways that individually have no real substance?
Like, if you lost all these little things, the big things would no longer be as important.
Like a big wing without all the little feathers.

I could have said, 'my daughter', but that's so predictable.

[mordant]

I regard a search for meaning or purpose to be bass-ackwards.

Instead I seek value. The things everyone is listing here are things that you value.

Add enough value to your life, and discard enough things that leach value from your life, and you wake up in the morning with the subjective feeling that your life has meaning and purpose. In other words, meaning and purpose are emotional responses to sufficient value. Life isn't meaningful; it FEELS meaningful. Or can, anyway.

So what adds value to my life is satisfying my various curiosities, my professional endeavors, my hobbies, and (unevenly) my family. And I have enough of those things that I wake up in the morning, and, provided I studiously ignore the 500 hundred pound gorilla in the room (my past losses and accumulated disappointments, sorrows and aches and pains and such like -- which, after all, are on balance no worse than the next person's) I feel reasonably pleased to continue to enjoy that value for another day.

[no one]

Deflowering those that promised themselves to hay soos.

[Rahn127]

The meaning of life.
Life means that something is living.

I am alive. I am the meaning of life.

This sounds rather simple, but if reflect on those words, you may understand. "I am the meaning of life."

The whole point of being alive is that you are alive.

[Shell B]

I also enjoy (quite selfishly) volunteering to do things when I have time and/or funds. I have an icky feeling when I have and other people have not, so I try to get rid of that icky feeling by giving, but never so much that I'm a have not. I'm definitely not in the running for sainthood, but sometimes that icky feeling goes away.