The meaning of life is a big subject. It’s also one that doesn’t have much of an effect on daily life, and as such, it’s usually reserved for philosophy students and people who want to appear introspective and deep. However, there are always times—during a brief respite from activity, or late at night, or after a “thinker” movie—that the question pushes itself into my mind: “Why are we here?” Fortunately, there is a philosophy of the meaning of life that is both uplifting and in line with scientific thought.

Assuming there are no gods (which I’ll get to later), our outlook from a physical standpoint is a little depressing. We are specks on a larger speck floating in a vast nothing around a dot of light that will eventually expand and explode, eating us in the process. Outside the corpse of our dot float an uncountable number of other dots with their own specks, all of which will go through the same process until the entire vast nothing goes dark. Each of us will only be alive for an infinitesimal amount of time next to the age of the vast nothing, and nothing we do will remain for a cosmically significant time. Nothing has purpose and we’re all going to die. This is the depressing part.

However, the depressing part is the basis for the uplifting part. Since nothing has inherent meaning, you can choose anything to give your life meaning. I first heard this philosophy in this short interview with Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon:

“The knowledge that nothing matters, while accurate, gets you nowhere . . . We have this fleeting chance to participate in an illusion called: "I love my girlfriend, I love my dog. How is that not better?”

I find that discussions about life and meaning tend to fizzle out when someone brings up that we are cosmically insignificant and everything is going to end. What many don’t realize is that a much happier thought lies one step further. You can interpret a bleak truth as something much more freeing and empowering: nothing is more special than anything else, so anything and everything can be seen as special. This philosophy even leaves room for religious belief—worshipping a god or a pantheon of gods and their values can give your life meaning just like anything else. You can believe the universe is an intentional creation while also believing it serves no intrinsic purpose.

Look at it this way. If there were one true meaning of life, one true purpose for living, one true objective . . . then what would be the point of anything else? If scientists finally did the math and found out that the reason humans exist is to build tall buildings (for example). Then what would be the point of building a snowman, or riding a bike, or kissing your significant other, or learning to play chess? Doing anything but building a tall building would be a waste of time and energy, and wouldn’t bring fulfillment. Thankfully, life has no intrinsic objective and everything is equal on a cosmic scale, so we can choose to find meaning in the things that make us happy. To put it succinctly, here’s a final message from Dan Harmon’s interview: “Every place is the center of the universe, and every moment is the most important moment, and everything is the meaning of life.”

TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) version:

people need 2 chill we're literally floating in space on a giant rock we can’t leave, look at the stars or something instead of being so awful pic.twitter.com/75mbRVO9Sr
— ‏ً (@blindsiren) April 10, 2018