Was I born to be alive?

mycall@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 9 points –

Maybe life is just an accident each time.

17

You were born because for parents made love. Your purpose is to live the life you want.

You were born for whatever reason you want. If you think you're here for spiritual or religious reasons, so you can make the world a better place, or for nothing, that's all ok. I personally believe I'm here for religious reasons but if you don't agree with that it's fine. There's no point in wasting time fighting over why we're here instead of spending what little time we have enjoying ourselves. Even if we don't have any purpose and are just going to dissapear back into the void we came from we just make it worse by sitting around doing and crying about it.

Personally, I don't believe in religion or spirituality or whatever. I feel like we're just here to fuck and reproduce.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes.

„We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?“ - Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder

technically, you were born to die. you're just not there, quite yet.

The idea of having a singular purpose in life is something that certain people are selling you. When you hear people talk about "their purpose in life" they are almost always trying to sell you to join something they deem are important. Most people purpose in life is to enjoy life and live. This can be just enjoying a day to day life doing things you enjoy. So yes you were born to be alive and enjoy it

I've determined that the only purpose we can have is to create as much art as possible before we expire.

I like that. I've not drawn my personal philosophy so explicitly but if I did, I think it would be a lot like that.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. What would it change? Or maybe we should ask, how would your actions change if life was an accident? Would you do something differently? Why?

Life isn't exactly an "accident." Your parents had to make a deliberate choice to have sex. Now, there is some sort of probability involved in the chances of pregnancy, which sperm cell creates a new person, and that new person actually surviving all the way to birth and beyond. But ultimately I wouldn't call life an "accident" outside of some very specific scenarios involving the parents. Your parents chose to create a new person, and that new person was you.

The purpose of life? Who's to say? Ask ten people and you'll get ten different answers. Some people spend their entire lives trying to answer that for themselves, others ignore it entirely. It's a question only you can determine the answer for yourself. But my answer to the question will likely be entirely different from your answer.

But ultimately I wouldn’t call life an “accident” outside of some very specific scenarios involving the parents.

We spilled chocolate milk on our clothes then decided to put them in the wash. Then I decided to do some roller skating around the house while your mom did her aerobics routine, and, well, let's just say there was a collision.

Maybe I’m just being semantic, but people don’t always make a deliberate choice to have sex (particularly women), and the vast majority of the time that people have sex, they’re not necessarily choosing to create a baby. It’s just sex.

There’s a huge difference between creating a baby and choosing to have a child, and that’s an important distinction.