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Question Nowadays, I feel as if right now, in this current world, humans are only wanting to study really hard in school, get a job, and receive money for food and personal items. I feel like there's more to life than that but everybody I ask seems to only want a good job and a lot of money. I am 16 years old and I know that I still have a lot of years to live through but sometimes I feel as if just getting a job and getting money with that job is such a pointless goal. I keep thinking if that is the meaning of life, then that is such an uninteresting goal. But, I still try my best in school and academics because I have this weird, abstract feeling that I absolutely HAVE to or I will fail in life. I do not know the explanation of that feeling but I listen to it. Is just getting a job, doing that job and getting money for it the meaning of the vast majority of this world's people's lives?

Accepted:
December 13, 2012

Comments

Thanks for your question, which is of course important and deep. Of course it has a psychological dimension (how you think and feel about things) and a sociological dimension (what's the case for many other people), but just to get you started on the philosophical dimension, you might consider having a look at Thomas Nagel's essay "The Meaning of Life" ... a copy of which you can find here: http://goo.gl/JGFAs .

Just FYI: The link Prof. Pessin supplied isn't an essay by Thomas Nagel. It appears to be a paper concerning Nagel's work on the meaning of life, a paper written by a student (Lucas Beerekamp) for a course at a university in the Netherlands. Chapter 1o of Nagel's introductory book What Does It All Mean? (1987) is entitled "The Meaning of Life." Perhaps that's what Prof. Pessin meant to refer to (although it's barely seven short pages). More likely he meant to refer to Nagel's famous Journal of Philosophy article, "The Absurd" (1971).