what is the meening of life? Answered

The answer to this meaning of life question depends a great deal on what kind of lifeform you are.  The question is most meaningful to intelligent lifeforms.

Yes. That's you, an intelligent lifeform.  Your brain a is a neuuh-rahl network pruuh-cessor, a leuuh-rning compuuh-ter. Erm... a  learning computer.

You probably thought that the meaning of life had something to do with pursuing happiness.

Well, happiness is a big part of it, but it's really about learning too. 

You see happiness and learning are intimately related.  Happiness is what you get when you succeed in learning something, or what happens when you succeed in a particular task, thus proving that your training worked.  It may seem like the goal is the important and desirable thing, but the goal is just there to motivate the training cycle. 

Regarding desirable goals, a.k.a. desires. The things you want to because you think doing them will make you happy, these are called desires. 

Some of your desires are hardwired. Desires for food, sex, praise, and being scratched behind the ears.  These desires are common among humans, and other mammals too. They're instinctive.  In fact if a human never learns about anything else, he or she could be happy with just food, sex, praise, and being scratched behind the ears. This is useful information to know for anyone who might be interested in keeping humans as pets. 

The trouble with humans though is that they're just so damn curious.

1. Learning leads to new desires.
2. New desires lead to discovery.
3. Discovery leads to learning.

And then its back to Step 1, a vicious cycle really.

Thankfully our forefathers and foremothers had the fore-sight to create institutions to wage war on curiosity, and keep us from learning too much, or from learning the wrong things, and thus from acquiring habits that are harmful not helpful. I am of course speaking of the institutions of education and religion.

You may have spent several of your so called "formative years" in such an institution.  It's OK. We've all been there. Or, I mean, most of us have... are the result of... some number of years of...  "formal" training.

But that's just the way it is with humans.  If you were a terminator-robot your programming would be different. Your desires would be different, and the things that make you happy would be different.  I mean, if you were a terminator-robot, then killing the target you were programed to kill would make you happy.  And more importantly, it would be something that you were really good at.  You could put it on your killer-robot-resume, and consider it a skill, and feel good about it.

But with humans it's different.  Most humans have so many desires that they're overwhelmed by them.  They want so many things.  They want the usual: food, sex, praise, and being scratched behind the ears.  But they also want money, fame, power, drugs, cable-tv, pr0n, and that's the easy stuff. Depending on who all you ask, humans want other things too, weird stuff, like:

• "Justice"
• "Peace on Earth and Good Will towards Men"
• "to be loved for who they are not just because they have nice bodies"
• "to make a difference"
• "to know what it all means"

It's enough to make you want to give up all your desires and worldly possessions, except for an orange robe and bowl to beg with, and then move some place tropical.


What did Buhda say to the hotdog vendor?  I'll tell you what he said.  He said,

"Make me one with... everything!"