I don't really want to get into a discussion about religion, but here are a couple of points. First of all, I believe we all have
souls that make us more special than other living things such as insects and microbes. So it is really is a blessing for us to be alive, and it is sad when our lives come to an end.
Second of all, one of the greatest moral philosophers of all time, Immanuel Kant, had some interesting ideas. He said that you should never treat a person, not even yourself, as a means to an end. For example, if you believe that your life is not an end in itself, but has value only if it serves a purpose such as making you or other people happy, then you are treating yourself as a means to an end. To put it another way, your life has value whether you are happy or not. You might disagree, but Kant was a pretty smart guy, and I'll take his word over other people's any day.
I can't tell you why life has meaning (you probably wouldn't agree with me, anyway),
but I can tell you that your life has value, period, and it would be a shame to waste it.
[QUOTE=DashGore12]1 i just view it as why should i struggle and go through bad experiences (and good ones) when once i get hit by a truck or whatever its all over.[/QUOTE]
Such questions are meaningless to people who have a strong will to live. Why struggle to live? Because you're alive. People who have a strong will to live don't need a reason to carry on, through good times or bad. Most people don't even think about existential issues; they just live. They do it because they
feel like doing it. That's what I mean when I say that philosophical issues would not cause you to despair if you
felt better. If you felt better, then you would want your life to continue even if you couldn't understand the meaning of life. "I'm alive, and I'm going to stay that way, thank you very much."
I suspect that your will to live is weak right now; otherwise, you wouldn't be asking us to give you a reason why you should struggle to live. I suspect that you are depressed. Depression saps the will and makes us feel that we might as well die since life is "meaningless". Depression makes us feel that the pain in our lives is so bad, we ought to kill ourselves to put an end to the pain.
There's no shame in being depressed. If I remember the numbers correctly (C Elegans can correct me if I'm wrong), one-third of the U.S. population has experienced or will experience depression at some point in their lives. That's a LOT of people. I'm not ashamed to say that I was once so depressed that I felt like committing suicide; I'm in good company. In hindsight, I can say that I must have been ill when I felt that way, and I don't feel that way now. I have a strong will to live, and I would struggle to live even if someone told me that there isn't any afterlife or the world was going to end tomorrow or I was really living in a bathtub hooked up to a computer that made me think I was living in the "real world".
I want to live, even if I'm not happy.
When you feel the will to live, you will feel that there are always alternatives, even if you haven't figured them out yet. "If something goes wrong, I'll try something else; I'm not going to give up." That is how you would feel if you weren't depressed. You wouldn't need for us to tell you why you should let your life go on; you would want your life to continue no matter what anybody said, and no matter how "pointless" life might seem.
I still believe that you will feel better someday. Then you will have your own stories to share with us about how you survived. Better get started.
