Well, you will find that just the question is flawed in itself. What purpose, why should there be a purpose? Water just flows, the cycle of water is a result of the physical laws governing it.³⁾ And I get it, calling the global ecosystem of water a “living” thing may be a stretch, but why does it have to be living? Just because a thing is alive means it must have a purpose? The question “what is the meaning of life?” assumes that there is a meaning. Simple rules can let complex mechanisms emerge, this is true for the cycle of water, this is true for those cool, hexagon-shaped basalt columns⁴⁾ and this is ultimately true for human life as well⁵⁾. If we agree that all those oxygen molecules don't have an intrinsic meaning and “just exist”, then we have no meaning either. We just are and even just the idea of groups of atoms (like those making up your body right now) having “meaning” is absurd.

History has a long and rich tradition of humans thinking of themselves as special, until they realized that they are not the center of their own star system, that even their own star system isn't the center of the universe and the realization that each and every - individual - human being has to make… That we are not the center of the universe either. It's hard to accept and I am still disappointed as well and probably in denial, but we all have to get there. I, the individual, me specifically will live and die in vain just like billions of people did before me, all of which I don't know or care about just as much as the people in 200 years will not know or care about me. We are but one droplet in a river of droplets, slowly carving a path and shaping the course we take - governed by the rules of physics⁶⁾.

Well, what is your purpose? “Purpose” and “meaning” are social constructs. Meaning is perhaps a spiritual construct, purpose is a result of goal-oriented planning. A purpose is a thought in someone's head. Someone might say that a chair has the purpose to be sat on, but someone else might use it for fuel in a fire. That's the purpose of that chair, and even if you say that this wasn't the intended purpose of the chair, that's still just the thought of someone's brain, not a physical truth.

I have established my perspective on this topic - hopefully I did so well. What should be clear is that I find this question to be kind of moot. From my perspective, everything another person will claim about being their “meaning” or “purpose” is “made up” and, well, I don't have many problems with it. Belief in belief means that believing in something can help a person as a coping mechanism and, as long as it is used that way, who am I to complain? Obviously it gets difficult if those believing in belief are trying to sell their stuff as truth or fact, but we will come to that later.

There are some religions that believe in a higher power, and that those higher powers have imparted a meaning onto us: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”. But why stop there? What's the meaning of the Lord? What's the meaning of Lord's meaning? If the Lord has a meaning imparted on him by someone or something else, and that meaning is to create living things (like you and me) and tell them to colonize their planet, then what's the meaning of our Lord being given that meaning, ie. what is our meaning beyond that which the Lord has given us? Why does the thing above the Lord want us to exist? Plus, I have yet to see compelling evidence that a Lord exists, so what do I care what this book proclaims it thought was true about the world? Did the writer of that book do any experiments to validate or falsify his assertions? Is it possible to do it with things of this nature in the first place?⁷⁾ So why do people take this and assign any perceived truth value to its claims? Because they want to believe it, not because they actually have anything to back it up.

See the main article on this topic: Singularity

Life and evolution is one huge battle of races. Lifeforms emerge, fight for domination and expand or exterminate based on fitness, and that's the cycle of life. So, what's your meaning? Obviously, your target is to expand your kind, your personal DNA as much as you can! You see, life is a fight! You, personally, are competing with every other strain of DNA, so you must find the best, most fertile, most fruitful partner that you can get, because if you don't then you go extinct, and that's disgraceful. Without your genes passed on, you are worthless. You LOSE⁸⁾, against everyone else who successfully passes on their DNA.

All those other humans around you, your friends and foes? They're all RIVALS, whenever something good happens to them it is BAD to YOU because it reduces your chances of MATING. Life is a zero sum game! You can't have friends. Unless you help each other improve your odds of mating, of course. Rape? Perfectly fine, you're just trying to pass on your genes. Hold still already, Woman, and serve your function!⁹⁾¹⁰⁾

It should be clear that this is a strawman. Proponents of the “life is a competition (of genes)” idea will most likely not hold this position (even though they really should if they believe in it). Yes, you can look at life through the lens of survival of the fittest, and you will find that many things will suddenly make a lot of sense, but 1) many other things will not and 2) this doesn't mean life is survival of the fittest. For contrast, you can look at life through the lens of class struggle. The fight of the burgeoisie to suppress us, the worker proletariats. Or through the lens of empathy. Or through the lens of races, black versus white. Many things will make sense when you look at life from that perfective, but many things will not, and it definitely doesn't mean that any of this is the meaning of life.

The point is, looking at life through the lense of, say, survival of the fittest, has no prescriptive power. It has descriptive power, as I said it's a very useful perspective from which to look at life. It has some predictive power as well, for sure, it's certainly a useful model for analyzation and making predictions about the future; however, it is missing prescriptive power - none of any of this is proof enough to go from “in our observation, survival of the fittest served as a useful model for describing animal and even some human behavior” to “survival of the fittest is the absolute meaning of life”.

Yup.