The Meaning of Life

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I'm tired of the "meaning of life" being a big question. I know what the meaning of life is.

When people ask what the meaning of life is, they do so because life doesn't feel sufficiantly meaningful to begin with. We make our lives feel meaningful by satisfying our psychological urges, such as our urge to be powerful, sexual urge ect.

In the stone age nobody ever asked what the meaning of life was because they felt content. They were in the environement for which the human brain is designed. A life in the wild satisfies human psychological urges to the extent that life never feels lacking in meaning. While we satisfy our urge to be powerful by working and through our hobbies, early man satisfied his urge to be powerful by hunting. In modern hunter-gatherer societies, nobody ever has a "mid-life crisis" because they have already lived quite an exciting, fufilling life by that time. The elderly accept the inevitability of death because they have already lived quite enough - they do not see their life as being unlived.

The "meaning of life" is a civilized phenomena, just as "identity crises" are a civilized phenomena. When everyone is a hunter-gatherer nobody asks "who am I?" Everyone knows "I'm a hunter-gatherer. That's what humans do. A cat catches mice, horse eats grass, a human hunts and gathers." We civilized humans are the only creatures on this planet that do not derive our personal identities from "what our species just does". Of course there were shamans back in the early days, but generally.

Indeed, Unabomber spent a great deal of time alone in the wilderness eating wild animals and in an interview he stated that after awhile he became too satisfied with living in the moment to worry about his own death - although he knew death to be an inevitability.

So here is the meaning of life:
Be a hunter-gatherer or something that is equally psychologically satisfying

BOOM!! ! There's your meaning of life.

I am perfectly happy buying a pizza and consuming it. I would not prefer to find out where pizzas gather to graze and pop out of a hiding place and shoot one with my bow and arrow while it's crying family watched me walk off in triumph with the poor dead thing.

Do you have a job, hobbies? If so, your satisfaction comes from there. Early man did not have our places to work and our video games ect. so he was satisfied in that regard by hunting.

We desire not simply to hunt but to have a purpose. We want to think we have mad skillz and we all have our ways of thinking of ourselves as skilled or useful. How we convince ourselves that we have a purpose depends on our environment and what opportunity it provides.

I do not think anyone would have a desire to hunt if they are satisfied in some other way. Someone might develop such a desire if they were desperate for a purpose and the idea crossed their mind.

I beleive all of this fits in with evolutionary psychology. I myself admit that although my reasons for believing all this are perfectly sound (in my opinion) the reason I posted it is because I, like most people, need something to do.

What do yo know about the hobbies of hunter gatherers? I doubt they played golf or rode fast motorcycles or even did jigsaw puzzles but they must have had some strange fun like teasing bears or screwing goats. Give them some credit for inventiveness.

You are right.

I'm more interested in how DMK knows they were content. Did someone invent a time machine while my back was turned?

I want a go

Being a hunter-gatherer was a necessity, not a hobby. I enjoy good (and bad) food just like the next guy. But washing down a pizza from Domino's with a bottle of Cold Duck (cheap, bastardized mixture of champagne/burgundy) is hardly necessary. But to be honest, there's great value to be had in practicing using firearms/bows and actually bringing down a protein source, not to mention growing your own grain and veggies. I don't think "Armageddon" (in the sense of the fall of civilization, not the Biblical one) is coming in my lifetime, but I wouldn't be surprised if it happened sooner than later. I like the thought of my children and grandchildren not having to depend on commercial markets for food distribution and maybe even being suppliers themselves.

I mean, I think our contemporary status has spoiled us, and I think Sand will agree. Just as an experiment, I decided to make a pasta meat sauce completely from scratch, all fresh ingredients (except for the cow, of course). Everything was store-bought, but from the produce section, not canned/preserved. So I peeled and diced (by hand) several tomatoes and threw them in the sauce. Since I'd never done this before, I was shocked that my sauce took on this really ugly brown color. It tasted GREAT. But it didn't LOOK like anything anyone would want to eat. And that's when it hit me just how much foods are "treated" to look more appealing.

I think if we were all subjected to those kinds of environments, forced to preserve our own foods, cooking from foods we grow ourselves, herding our own protein, harvesting our own grain, we wouldn't look at eating as just another hobby (it IS). We'd be less concerned for our palate and more concerned with maintaining weight and surviving. Hobbies? What hobbies? You'd have to rely on natural fibers for diapers, which means you couldn't dispose of them. So imagine washing those stinky things out with home-made lye soap (save the ashes from your wood-burning fireplace, you'll need it for potassium). And that's just part of what a woman will have to do all day to take care of the home and the children. Meanwhile, the men have to figure out how to meet their carbohydrate needs for the year by harvesting wheat from one acre of land (simple trick, everyone consolidates their harvests to a single free public-access threshing-floor and granary and only takes what he needs for his own family, and in return EVERYONE has to help with each other's harvest). Beer would no longer be something we drink just because it tastes good and makes us feel warm and fuzzy--it would simply be a way of preserving grain through the winter months and through planting season. Think of it as a kind of old-fashioned Gatorade (it was once commonplace to drink on the job for a very good reason--to keep going. Now, of course, you'd get fired for that). And it wouldn't even taste that great because, likely, you wouldn't have hops to balance the sweet flavor. It would be like drinking syrup, never mind the after taste.

I'm not so sure the meaning of life is hunting/gathering--if so, it's not much of a meaning. We just live in such a time that we are afforded luxuries and conveniences our ancestors never dreamed of, and that allows us to specialize in a wider variety of occupations, such as auto-mechanic, computer repair, musician, tractor driver, and so on. We also have more time on our hands to spend with our pastimes (hobbies). Too bad more of those things are passive, such as spending all evening with our kids watching television. It makes me wish I'd worked harder to earn enough money to buy a bow, some arrows, and a bale of hay.

I do my own cooking and baking and I understand the processes and what is necessary. Living wild requires much more than common knowledge of domestic processes. There are all sorts of tricks and dangers in food gathering and merely being able to kill something is hardly enough. It is very dependent upon what part of the world you live in and the local ecology. It requires huge knowledge and very special skills. I m sure there are books that can help but nature changes all the time. The world is now full of man made poisons and much of the old ecology has disappeared. I doubt anyone can just jump into the wild life. It takes years of experiment and learning and probably more basic physical toughness and natural disease resistance than most people have.

9 out of 10 people suddenly forced to live in the wild would perish for lack of skill and luck. The people who lived the HFG life mode acquired the necessary skills from early childhood. It is a cultural thing. I am sure moderns would do just as well if they were brought up to live close to nature from the git-go. But they are not.

Our fore-runners and forbears person for person were just as intelligent as modern folk, and in some respects more so. They had to do a lot more with a lot less. The only advantage moderns have is that we have been handed the accumulated knowledge of thousands of years on a platter. We are privileged to live at the feeding trough, rather than having to make the trough from nearly nothing.

ruveyn

ruveyn

So, basically, our purpose is to satisfy our selfish desires?

Sounds about right TBH. Stupid useless humans.

Plus, our ancestors didn't lived alone, they lived in tribus. Likelly they needed to live in tribus to survive.

We live in tribes also. They are called Nations.

ruveyn

Now there's an interesting statement, which just happens to be neither falsifiable nor verifiable.

meaning of life;

reproduction

it is for all creatures, we are no different

Humans ask the Big Questions as naturally as breathing. They don't necessarily come up with good answers, though.

ruveyn

Once we tie down the meaning of meaning we can take the next step.