In the first place, life is not meaningless. Life is a grand tour, full of wonder, awe, beauty, and mystery. How long a body stays alive has no bearing on the issue.
My personal opinion is that the sense of personhood as a separate individual is an illusion, sustained by memory. Perhaps all these overlapping lives should be thought of as a single entity. Even if your body lived a thousand years, I think that you would be a different person. You’d have no use for those old memories from a thousand years ago—they’d be hard to manage. The question of personal identity is tricky. I address that issue in “The Staggering Implications of the Mystery of Existence”, available on the Kindle Store.
Why would living forever change anything as far as meaning? It means our environment would be constantly changing and new challenges would abound. This is predicated on living a relatively pain free, comfortable life
Well, I would say “no”. The biological function of this human machine is only the mechanics of life. What gives like meaning is how you live it. The experiences, the love, the wonder of viewing the world and how you affect others in a positive way. Leaving the world or just a small part of it better than when you found it. A line from one of my favorite poems which I have posted on this site: “The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and YOU may contribute a verse.” Walt Whitman.
That is a mute question but life is meaningless anyway!
@Gwendolyn2018 Yeah, I guess that was some sort of Freudian skip!
@Gwendolyn2018 Oops, there I go again!
@Gwendolyn2018 If they all made the same mistakes they must have b
@Gwendolyn2018 What happened?! Like I tried to say, if they all made the same mistakes they must have been coping each other's notes! wink
@Gwendolyn2018 I'll bet that's a big problem these days. Didn't I hear that there was a special search-engine available to sus out plagiarism?
@Gwendolyn2018 I assume this is HS. Of course what you said is correct. It would be easy. I was sort of referring to College but these days, they are probably not much more sophisticasted either!
@Gwendolyn2018 Imagine a PHD dissertation that was plagiarised! Yuk Yuk. BTW. If you would live forever you'd trip over your hair! You could play Repunzel!
@Gwendolyn2018 To combine paraphrasing: "Hair today, long tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps down this pretty face from day to day"
No. Life has (can have) meaning regardless of the length of time it lasts. Life is represented by what we do while living, not by how long we live. That isn't to say that life cannot become meaningless after a period of time.
I really have no, clear idea of how long i would like to live. I know that it would be based on many factors, not least of which are health and mobility. One thing is certain, I would want the ability to say "Enough! Lemme outta here!"
Moses and noah lived almost a 1000 years and they had no complaints.
Have you seen copies of their birth certificates and obituaries?
@fishline79 They must be hidden with the other biblical facts
I don't necessarily buy that life has meaning. It emerged out of the cosmos (or whatever we call it), so it just is. At some point, it won't be. Yeah, we have some sort of meaning we try to create in this trivial spec-of-time life we lead, but in the larger picture.......none.