Creating life is senseless because life has no purpose of its own, there is nothing of its own that needs to be achieved, there is nothing of its own that it is important to carry out. Life doesn’t exist for any purpose other than self-preservation and reproduction. It sustains itself circumstantially but nothing external justifies it. There isn’t and never was a plan, but rather we are all just reproduction robots of DNA molecules. Life is not a product of goal directed activity but of goalless unintentional physical, chemical and biological processes. Existence has no reasons, only causal factors. Nothing has a purpose in itself. Nothing has any external justification. Some think that the suffering of some individuals may be justified by a greater cause, however, considering that there is no greater cause, for the simple reason that life has no cause of itself at all, the suffering of no individual could be justified by a greater cause. Human life keeps going because people keep making humans, not because it is necessary, needed, important, or serves some greater cause.
The question of the meaning of life has yet to receive a satisfying secular rational answer. Usually the frustrating answer to this crucial question is that the meaning of life is to find meaning by oneself. But isn’t it actually an admission that life has no meaning of its own? If life is a platform for finding meaning it means that there was no meaning before someone was created, and therefore it needs to be asked, is it fair and is it sensible, to create a person despite the fact that the person has no reason to exist and their existence has no meaning of its own? What’s the point in throwing someone into a life that has no meaning of its own hoping that that someone would find meaning by themselves? If there is a need to find meaning to life, it means that there was no meaning previous to its creation, and if there wasn’t any why create someone only for that someone to try and find meaning that can justify their creation retroactively? Doesn’t it make much more sense that first of all there would be a reason for an action instead of performing it first and then looking for reasons to perform it?
Many philosophers have suggested, and many keep making suggestions such as to look at life from an ironic perspective, to accept the absurdity of human existence as given and embrace it, to laugh at our fate so much that we would agree to relive the exact same life over and over and over again, or to simply nullify the question since the claim that life is meaningless is also meaningless. But what is a person who fails to find meaning to his own life by himself supposed to do with this kind of vague suggestion? How does the logical and linguistic trick regarding the lack of meaning help a person who feels that their concrete existence is meaningless? How is it useful to tell people that they must live their lives as if they would eternally repeat themselves, when they are searching for a meaning or a reason for the life that as far as they are concerned they are living only once?
Many others suggest that the meaning of life is to simply live. This answer is completely vague as well since clearly someone who has reached the point of wondering what is the meaning of life doesn’t really have an idea of what it means to simply live it and will not be satisfied with such a suggestion. This is probably what this kind of person did so far, and it’s exactly this that has brought that person to wonder what is the meaning of all this. This answer, at best, actually cancels the question in principle since it doesn’t offer a solution but only disregards it. To simply live life means to stop asking questions about life.
And on the practical level this suggestion is also unclear because it is not simple to simply live, certainly not when it is unclear what to live even means. What does it mean to simply live? How does one simply live? And how does one not simply live? What’s the difference between simply living and living? Arguing that the meaning of life is simply to live is equivalent to arguing that it is what it is, that’s the way it is, or live and shut up.
Some are even arguing that questions about the meaning of life are by their nature senseless since they require an external view over life while our view is necessarily from within our own life. All our values are derived from our experience and our cognition, and these are necessarily from within the world and not about the world. The limits of our world are the limits of our cognition. Or according to Wittgenstein, the prominent representative of this attitude, the limits of our language are the limits of our world, and therefore we don’t even have or could have an option to ask questions about the meaning of life since we don’t have a linguistic option to describe life as a whole because our language is limited by our experience within the world and therefore it can’t describe what’s outside it. Not only does Wittgenstein argue there is no solution to the question of the meaning of life, and that in principle it is impossible to answer this kind of question, he also argues that therefore it is not really a problem. However, the impossibility of answering a question doesn’t cancel the problem, only the option of solving it. And the inability to solve a problem does not resolve it but quite the contrary…
For many, the issue of meaning in life is really a problem, and claiming contra to these people that this problem simply negates itself since we have no linguistic tools to solve it, doesn’t solve any problem for anyone who certainly has the linguistic tools to define the problem.
Obviously in a world with no pre-given answers, with no god or any other external authority, everyone needs to figure out for themselves what the meaning of life is, and that includes reading what philosophers think about the issue. That’s why their suggestions to find meaning by yourself are vague and circular. Someone who is looking for answers about the meaning of life in philosophy is probably doing so because he has already searched for them, and therefore the suggestion to look for meaning by yourself as a conclusion of the self-searching process, is circular, vague, and testifies to the inability of philosophy throughout all of history to provide a serious answer to such a crucial question.
How does the suggestion to look at the meaninglessness of life in an ironic way help a person in the midst of an existential crisis? And how does one look at the meaninglessness of life in an ironic way? How should we look at suffering, suffering in general not necessarily our own, from an ironic perspective? How does an ironic view soothe the suffering of others or even our own? Does looking at world hunger for instance, from an ironic perspective – for example the fact that there is enough food for everyone and much of it is thrown away every day and yet hundreds of millions of people suffer from hunger and malnutrition – sooth the suffering of the one looking at this in irony? Does it somehow sooth the suffering of the hungry? Should they also embrace the absurd? Should they also laugh at their fates and declare that they are willing to live the same lives over and over again?
To get back to the issue of creating new people: while suggesting to people who already exist to find meaning by themselves, since life has no cosmic meaning, is very disappointing philosophically, it is ethically legitimate as long as it’s not suggested to create the people who wonder what is the meaning of life. Such a suggestion is not ethically legitimate when it comes to creating new people. Creating people in a meaningless world is morally wrong because what kind of ethical justification does such an action have? That the created people might find meaning to their lives retroactively doesn’t absolve the ones who created them from the responsibility of creating them without any prior meaning.
What’s the point and is it fair to throw people into a reality in which their lives have no meaning of its own but they must find one and only after they already exist?
The ones who already exist have no choice, they must find some meaning to their lives because they have already started, but why create new lives before they have any meaning? How can the creation of life be justified in a world that lacks meaning of its own and before these lives could have had meaning at all? Ethically, actions require justification, but what can justify the creation of life in a meaningless world?
Had life been absolutely without any suffering, this wouldn’t be such a significant moral issue, but since life is full of suffering, it certainly is.
It is impossible to argue that the suffering in life is justified due to a greater goal that justifies it. There are no greater goals, there is only life, and suffering is a biological necessity of it. Life exists with no justification and therefore suffering exists with no justification. There isn’t some kind of external justification to life, there is no goal, reason, destiny, need, necessity or purpose. Since life has no purpose of its own, the suffering is not morally justified.
What makes the issue of lack of meaning even more severe, is that in order to fill their lives with meaning, many people are creating new people. And these people will create new people in order to fill their lives with meaning and so on and so forth. And this forcing of meaningless lives will never end because a meaning to life is not expected to appear at any stage. Each generation will impose on the next one a meaningless life in order to fill its own generation with meaning. A concept with a similar mechanism exists in the business world, it is called a Ponzi scheme.