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Hope and The Meaning of Life

What is the meaning of life?  I can't interpret this question.  I understand that it's abstract.  Its answer, if it has one, is probably abstract, too.  But I don't think it's posed well enough to encourage good thinking about a genuine answer.  It seems to presuppose that there is something that life means.  Furthermore, there is feeling tied up in this question.  That there may be no meaning to life seems to some hopeless.  Is it implicit in the question that any answer must pertain to hope?  I don't myself see the connection between hope and the meaning of life.

Where does hope come from?  Honestly I'm not sure what hope definitely is.  I know what it's like to hope for something.  Sometimes I will act to increase my chances of getting what I hope for. But I can act independently of hope. Even when it's not realistic to hope for a particular thing I can hope for something else.  And I can hope for something without considering what the meaning of life might be.  

So what's actually happening here?  People are speaking metaphorically.  They can't really think that trying is futile if life is meaningless.  That's non sequitur.  I don't know for sure but I suspect that in implying a connection between unhappiness and the meaning of life entire they are simply trying to describe some big sorrow.  

I have been deeply sad before.  I've seen the space in which one might declare that the meaninglessness of life is related to the vanity of all ambition and the inevitability of ultimate failure.  But I emerged from that place having seen something different: that on a long enough timeline everything is futile and that whether I judge that good, bad, or otherwise has no bearing on its truth or how I proceed from it.  And that I may as well persist without hope because there truly is none if I don't. 

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