[AngriestLettuce]

Yeah. Absurdism is pretty rad. Embrace the abyss, and you will never have to gaze directly at it again. Life is inherently meaningless. That means it has any meaning you want it to. Comparing it to the alternatives of what I'm told life is supposed to be all about and mean, I have to say I like making it up as I go along far better. I'll never know everything, and that means I'll always have something to live for. That makes me feel at peace.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Life can't be meaningless if it can also have whatever meaning you give it, unless you give it the degenerate meaning of 'nothing', though.

Hence my issue with this: If you need to use (1) "life is meaningless" as a stepping stone to (2) "therefore, life has whatever meaning you give it", you've already agreed to that constraint by default. I'm sure it helps a lot of people get from (1) to (2), but better still is to realize (2) is in a sense _deeper_ than (1) and you can just throw out (1) once you have (2) locked down enough in your psyche.

[AngriestLettuce]

You misread my statement. Life has no inherent meaning. It is inherently meaningless. Therefore you make your own meaning to give it one. Simple as that. You can, of course, let someone else make a meaning for you, and choose that instead, but it's not something integral to life itself. Just your life.

That's not the same as life having no meaning, just not an inherent one. A fireplace is not inherently burning, but if you stack a bunch of logs in there and light it, it will burn all the same. The meaning of life is just the same. The physical reality of it is at it is, but what you do with it is up to you. You can follow the path laid out before you, like lighting the fireplace, but nothing's stopping you from grabbing a knife and running off to the woods to run with the wolves if that's what you'd rather do. Nothing but yourself, anyway.

[deanCommie]

You're still making a choice, and decided when to stop asking follow-up questions.

But you're still finding meaning in the abyss - you're choosing what to live for.

Which is great!

Most people can't get there. They stare into the abyss, and run screaming back to some false comfort.

[AngriestLettuce]

It's not so much that I've stopped asking questions, as it is that I am no longer unsafe about what I know. I question my reality every day, but not having all the answers no longer scares me. I know what I know, I know what I don't know, and I know what I think but can't prove. I find out new things every day, and that makes me happy.

I stop asking questions once I am satisfied I understand something, not before. Sometimes I'll leave a question for later, to give my brain some time to digest it, but besides that, I'm always working through something or other. Just gotta ask the right questions is all.