<p>What is it?</p>
<p>maximize the sum of an individual's happiness?</p>
<p>there isn't a real meaning to life.</p>
<p>but since i am still alive, i might as well try to do all i can before im dead.</p>
<p>I look at life from the view of SC Statesman John C. Calhoun:
"In looking back I see nothing to regret and little to correct"
That's my goal at least...</p>
<p>Make babies! Make babies! Make more babies!</p>
<p>Oh, wait, I forgot one thing. Yeah, make boxes. That's also important.</p>
<p>To fornicate ?</p>
<p>To achieve happiness and find someone - to be totally free and true to yourself - to be able to stand up for what you believe in.</p>
<p>What if you believe in having lots of sex ?</p>
<p>
[quote]
find someone - to be totally free and true to yourself
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That was included here. :)</p>
<p>in the end, to kill each other :)</p>
<p>lmao now you've got it.</p>
<p>Brand 182 did a good job in a little space. But of course, I want to say something:</p>
<p>Some will say find something outside yourself, bigger than yourself, that you believe in and dedicate yourself to that.</p>
<p>And I agree largely with that, but for me that can make you purely sacrificial, and life should involve a bit of selfishness too, I think. Though I hate the word selfishness. This selfishness would involve:</p>
<p>fulfillment in family
fulfillment in friendship
fulfillment in love
sexual fulfillment
professional fulfillment
physical and mental health (which you can partly control)</p>
<p>This all involves following your heart, listening to yourself, and shutting out to a certain extent what others and the world impose on you. Those who are happiest learn to live within their own rhythms I have noticed.</p>
<p>And if you are a chronically unhappy person -- work on that with discipline. Try exercise. Try spiritual fulfillment. Try medicine (yes, that helps some people). And hang in there.</p>
<p>This is a slightly more detailed version of maximize the sum of your happiness. The problem with maximizing the sum of your happiness as a goal is that it is easier to focus on your happiness today vs. long-term fulfillment. Yes, live today. But life is often very long for people, so only living for the present can conflict with setting you up for happiness in the future. However, I think that most CCers don't have this problem, of excluding a focus on the future for the joy of the present.</p>
<p>The purpose of life is to enjoy it while it lasts!</p>
<p>If you know it was going to end in say a week, that focuses the mind and makes what you should do obvious. The hard part is we don't know when it will end, so there is a constant balancing that should go on. But also, you have to be optimistic and assume it will go on for many years. So, you need to work toward your future too.</p>
<p>to suck out the marrow of life, and to not find when we come to die, that we have not lived. to rout out all that is not life. :)</p>
<p>Make good grades and get into a top school, duh. EVERYONE knows your life is cut out for you if you make it into HYPSM.</p>
<p>LOL, what?</p>
<p>So, getting into HYPSM is a bad thing?</p>
<p>I think we have a failure to communicate here, in the form of a strange idiom.</p>
<p>And agreed with the "Make BABIES!" comments - why else would we be inclined to suffer through the agony that is pregnancy? Because instinct tells us too, and instinct drives most of life.</p>