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Yay, first topic! Ok, let's get this off the ground with the first in, maybe a recurring theme, of a scenario!

Ok so i am a person who has completely given up on life, i have no job, no house, my girlfriend/boyfriend has dumped me and basically my life completely sucks, what would you say?

Victoria

Well, I would have to say that the tiny things in life are still enjoyable. You would still be able to feel more pleasant emotions in the future, and lets face it, there are people in worse situations they you. Some have lived their whole lives in torment, or died because of constant torment. So what if you have no job? No house. No lover. All of those things are temporary. You've had pleasant memories that you could relish in.

For me, life is worth living mainly for the people I am close to and the little things in life. Like reading an exceptionally well written book or staring at nature that was manipulated to yield to human desire. The fleeting emotions of all sorts are what make me get up from my warm bed. The everyday things in life, that others normally find boring, make up most of the reasons why life is worth living. Also, interacting with humans that you trust and are conformable with, talking about random things, letting them evoke emotions, and just being around them makes life worth living, for me, at least. But the answer changes for each individual.

Well, to tell you the truth, your first topic caught me off guard. I never thought about it before. I guess it's because I live but never truly live. And I began to think. Why is life worth living? What makes it so beautiful that even though I haven't found a true purpose in my life yet, I hate dying. I came to my class and asked my classmates the same question. They gave me different answers. Some said that it was because of love. Some said life was worth living because they could reach their dreams, their ambitions, their desires. Some said that it was worthy because when they lived, they could be near their loved ones. What about me? What makes me think that life is worth living? I asked myself that question all yesterday but a clear answer never came to my mind. I guess life is worth-living because it is beautiful. The nature is beautiful. The sun, the moon, the sea, the fields...etc. Yeah, it sounds really cliche, I know but it's the only reason I can think of. And maybe life is worth-living because I'm afraid of death. No, not the quick, painless death but the slow, and painful death. It fills me with dread, imagine that I have to die so painfully like that someday. I'm afraid what I don't understand and in this case, death. What waits for me in that darkness? And so, even if I haven't found a purpose yet, I continue to live, to breath... and that is my reason to live, for now...maybe I will be able to find another answer soon but at the moment, that is all I can say to you...My reasons are only because I love the beauty of the nature and I want to avoid death.

Victoria

Life has a lot of different factors that are beautiful, not only is nature magnificent, but things as simply as a stack of books make me stare at it for a while in an attempt to take in all the details. Unfortunately, I never remember the details, so I have to go onto the next subject that catches my attention. Beauty isn't even always images, its emotions, actions, thoughts, any sort of combination of things. It's only cliche because it is true, which makes people say it often. Being enveloped in the beauty sounds nice, but something is always tainting it. Then again, if life wasn't worthy, why is anyone alive?

Well, to people with borderline personality disorder probably don't think live is worth living, why? From what I've read, they have an emptiness that nothing seems to be able to fill, they have no aspirations, but need constant attention from others in a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness. To be empty...that is when life isn't worth living. To me, emotions are probably the things that motivate us to do anything.

I don't think there is a true purpose for anyone, except, maybe, to live. Do what you think find dear to your heart. I don't like the idea of there being a true purpose because what if I don't like it? What if my purpose in life is something as terrifying as leading a mass murder? I don't want to cause death. Death is terrifying, for many people. I think that's a natural fear because it also motivates us not to accept death, those who don't care whether or not they want to die probably have experienced enough of life and are simply tired of it. I haven't even gotten through my first year of high school, I still want to do idiotic, meaningless things. I still want to experience many different screw ups, emotions that I still haven't discovered for myself, and a long list of other things.

First off, this is a question which, like most, depends on the person answering it. I'm not going to say that this is what you should live for, not going to pretend this is the reason for living. This is simply why I live.

I live because of the little bits and pieces of happiness I scrape together from the people around me, the little tinge of satisfaction when I write/draw something and realise I'm getting better everyday, the feeling of elation I get when I do something that I thought I could never do - no matter however small it might be, like walking down that dark lane that always scares me out of my wits all alone, the bliss I feel when I look at the moon and the earth, the reason I delve into books, music, anime, mangas, movies to experience another way of life, the way a smile spreads itself across my face when I break myself away from my surroundings and suddenly discover that I am alive, I am here.

I think you should concentrate on what you have and what you could have instead of regretting what you lost. No home? Alright, try your best to get a job and move into a dorm or something, save up and get one! No lover? Utilise the free time you have by concentrating on yourself and your job! You don't live for a job, a house, or even your boyfriend. You live for yourself, and you live for living.

Heh, these are all great reasons and great conversational feed.
Now as to my reason for living. Well, i'm lazy, i like to relax i have hopes and dreams like everyone else. I've had good times and bad times like everyone else. In some way that is how all humanity is, and heck everything else in exsitance, are linked, Flowers grow in the Spring then die in the Winter, Animals eat and get eaten. Humans loe and gain, like the tides of the oceans.

We all love, we all need, we all hate and we all love, no matter who we are, where we are or how we came to be. We are all equal and honestly i don't like people who believe they are lower than everyone else, going nowhere and wanting sympathy and i defintely hate those who think themselves as gods.
People talk about generation, generations x & y. X is the hireracy where you had the king, then the lords, then the servents. Y is the web generation, people all on the same level but just in different places.

To explain my personal opinon in few words. I guess i kind of live to see people treated as equals, make of that what you will but i will drag up those who think they are scum and ground those who think they are gods with absolutely no right to do so. This will change as all things do.

'The one thing that is certain in all of life, is that there will be change.'

Elizabeth

I just wanted to start by saying that I LOVE all of your posts so far and I am very honored to be a part of this community because everyone is putting in real honest thoughts and really thinking about the topics! :D

Now with the topic…I have noticed that there are some common trends that have been going on here and I agree with most of them. I think that this question’s answer is really going to change from person to person so I also do not want to tell people why their life is worth living! With that being said, for me, life is all about the journey. I know that is another cliché but I really believe that you spend majority of your life on your way to your hopes and dreams and very few moments actually achieving them. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that you should have aspirations but I don’t think that you should focus on them so much that you can’t absorb everything you possibly can from the experiences you have while trying to achieve them.

I am also someone who thinks that everything happens for a reason (another cliché, I know). Sometimes life just takes a negative downfall and everything just seems pointless. I have been in that position before when I was battling anorexia and that was a poor choice on my part but because I went though that I learned boat loads of information about myself and it made me deal with a tom of problems that I had been ignoring for almost my whole life. It made me stronger and it taught me how to deal with things when they go wrong. It also taught me how to deal with abuse that I had been going through since I was about three (note that this was not physical abuse but a type that hurt just as much). With all that being said, I think that it is pretty clear in my case that even though turmoil happens, it isn’t all bad and it makes us stronger and better people because of it.

Another thing that I think makes life so beautiful is that you can choose how you want to live it. I think that it is your choice if you make life worth living or not; if you wallow around in the negative or you focus on the positive. I am a huge believer in what you focus on is what you strengthen and I think that if you look at life as half full, that you will be able to make it completely full. I agree with all of you who said that you don’t live for things or other people (those are unreliable) but you live for yourself. In the end I think that you are the only thing that you can really trust and rely and on and have with you until it is all over. You choose if you are the one who you rely on and I think by doing that your life will become less painful and you will be in more control of your life.

I guess to try to tie this all together, life is worth living based on how you choose to deal with the obstacles that come your way and learning how to be an extraordinary person through these experiences. It is worth learning everything there is to learn from both the good and the bad to make your achievements mean more to you. Most importantly though I think that life is worth living for whatever reason you choose to live it :D

I just put a ton of thoughts down here and I may have rambled on a lot but I think it works! I look forward to hearing what some of your other thoughts are and what new topics will be brought up!

AH! Looks like everyone had beat me to the punch. Such awesome explanations...and it's time for me to ask: Why is life worth living?

It took me a while to come up with an answer that made sense (to me anywho) but I think i got it After digesting everyone's two cents. I've even come up with a little formula:



It's so simple; it's stupid. Life is worth living because it's a lot better then death. Practically, everything that people know revolves around life, alongside with theories about what happens after death (Reincaration, Heaven & Hell, etc, etc) because it involves the absence of life.

Stupid quote #1 by moi:

Life is worth living for the sake of living.

Then that's when it starts to get a little subjective for people because "living" can be a subjective term. Living can then therfore be, money, love, adventure, excitement, family, etc, etc. I like to think of living as anything and everything that can invoke anything within us; hence why I believe music is a popular concept because it has the possibility to invoke all sorts of emotions. I also like to think of living as the totality of life, all the events, seconds, relationships, etc. By my definition, living could then involve all the negative aspects of life, or as Cazuki's example is: Depression (What the scenario sounds like to me).

That brings me to something rather important: Suicide. If anyone has tried it; it's nice to know you backed out. I'll get back to this in a few seconds but let's say there's a hot burner in front of you. Putting your hand right on it will give you no benefit whatsoever and will most likely give you burn marks; which could restrict a majority of activities that involve a hand. Don't do it. I mean, all of you are bright enough not to even let the thought wander around. Let's replace the burner with a cliff. You're not going to stand over the cliff like an idiot unless you have some important reason like wanting to have a grand view of the ocean or perhaps you're some sort of thrill seeker that likes to get the blood pumping. Why would you be a thrill seeker? Because it's a huge cliff with spiky rocks protruding from the bottom. (Yes, I added spiky rocks).

On the edge of the cliff one's obviously going to feel fear. If you think of falling and dying; you're going to have have fear because the thought of being denied life puts you there. Being denied life is being denied EVERYTHING one knows from waking up in the morning to breathing and everything in between. Now let's say you're chronically depressed and you're on the same edge of the cliff. You have decided to commit suicide. Then there's that same fear creeping up again.

That reflex tells us something. It tells us that the value of life is hardwired into our brains even if we try to reject it. Sadly, fear is the only thing from within that can pull someone from suicide once they're on the course. Some people sadly overcome fear while some luckily follow it and preserve their lives. Primal fear for one thing; leads us back to the preservation of life. One needs food, one has the fear that the lack of food will result to death, death will be a denial of life, and life becomes the most important thing in the world.

Let's actually think about the amazing feats some people have done like...saving a life. A person reilizes that someone is in danger, reilizes the predicament he is in, and rushes to save the person's life. This person is hailed as a hero by society because he manages to preserve the life of another human being.

To say this merely makes a loop brings me back to my quote:

Life is worth living for the sake of living.

life is worth liveing becasr simply put its life Also life is to short to wallow in saddness i know because im gilty of it. Juist live life to the fullist and itll work out.

I would like to start off by saying something against what Ramin said:


This is not true. Fear can play a major role in making you pull yourself from the course of taking your own life, but it is not the only thing. If it were the only thing that could pull someone from suicide then I would not be here to answer the loveliest question ever of "Why is life worth living?" Suicide can be brought on by a number of things, feelings, depression brought on by surroundings and events, depression brought on because that's how your brain is wired, the inability to or just not wanting to deal with something. Sometimes suicide really is the only way out, especially to a permanent situation. A friend of mine has schizophrenia and honestly wanted to die. This wonderful person with an affliction of the mind stopped himself several times because of the encouragement of friends, and the fact that this person knew he was most certainly wanted. In the end, he did kill himself because he couldn't handle what was going on with himself. I myself teetered on the edge, though not for the same reasons, and I wasn't afraid at all. I wanted it, and I welcomed it, but I didn't do it because of my friends, and certain family members. Fear was in there but I quite honestly didn't care about it, it had nothing to do with my decision to live. Just letting you know that fear can play a role, but it isn't the only thing there.

Anyways on towards the question at hand: Life is worth living for those small moments that just make you smile and feel happy for no real reason. For example, when I'm sitting down at a friends house and we're talking about how I never show up to youth group and I tell my friend that if she wishes me to come more often all she has to do is walk up to the door with a water-gun and kidnap me. At which point my friend yells "WE CAN DO THIS THE EASY WAY OR THE HARD AND WET WAY!!" Now my friend is a good little home-schooled Christian girl with no hints of a dirty mind, but this, especially coming from her, simply made my day. I fell off my chair and laughed hysterically for about ten minutes. Moments like being at a wedding and a little kid gets a small bit of champagne for the wedding toast who doesn't know what it's for. When this small child asks he's told it's for the toast, then this small child exclaims; "Toast? I don't want toast!" And this child gulps the champagne down. Moments like that are what make life worth living. Those small moments that just make you laugh, that are totally explainable and just make you happy at the naivete of a child or at the unintentional dirty joke.

Another thing that makes life worth living is having something you enjoy, that you will always enjoy no matter what. Take something like dance. It's fun, it can be strict, demanding, time consuming, and overall draining, but in the end everything you put into it is totally worth it. You get a workout, muscles, a healthy body, a stress reliever, and tons of fun. Writing is great too. It takes you to a new character, a brand new world, someplace inside your mind that is extremely pliable and accessible when writing. Then there is reading. New worlds, new people. If it's an old and much beloved book, or series it's like meeting your best friends again or loathing your greatest enemy for a while. All these things give something special to you that can't be taken back, and in the end all you really have to dedicate to them is a bit of time.

New experiences make life interesting. Say you've never been heartbroken before, being heartbroken and coming out of it alive, and possibly stronger: That just made your life into something new and better, it made it so next time your less vulnerable. After my first heartbreak I haven't been heartbroken again. Of course, after that I generally don't let people get close enough to actually hurt me that much anymore. People still get close, and they are in my heart, but I know it's likely they'll only be temporary thus I brace myself for disappointment.

In order for life to be worth living you have to take the good with the bad and understand that without the bad there would be no good. However it's the positive parts that make you keep going while the negative ensures that you don't get to far ahead of yourself. So life is worth living as long as you learn to enjoy the positive things and you recall them in your negative moments so you keep moving forward, with the thought that something good will probably happen because there is always going to be some ditzy person, great book, new writing challenge, new experience, exciting things that will always end up happening that will make you cheer up.

Well, that is a good question. Maybe we all just got to complacent in life, maybe we just decided to give up trying to achieve. No matter how we answer it'll only be a partial answer to the question.

People grew lazy, they began to believe they could get something for absolutely nothing. Maybe they put to much stock in the myth of Robin Hood, they just believed some random rogue would rob the "thieving" rich and give to them. In a way it does happen, there's welfare. In schools it's called "No Child Left Behind."

In my school so many people are content with just barely passing. Most just want to reach the graduation point and then they have no idea where to go. In this day and age a lot of people believe that they can do nothing to impact the world, and so many people I know have said they won't even try. If we switch views and look at another school about twenty minutes away from mine, people there compete to get the highest score, just barely passing is not an option, they must achieve perfection. One of my friends from that school is determined to find a sure fire cure for all cancers. The difference of twenty minutes is huge. Just by looking around you can see productivity isn't truly dead, but you can see that there are a lot of people who are all to willing to just sit around and be happy with where they are in life.

I have to agree with Mamimi K. this is an entitlement society. We believe that we deserve what we haven't earned, and that we should get things we cannot afford. In today's society people aren't interested in saving money up and working hard to get something they want, they swipe a credit card or they stick out their hand and say "Give me."

Erm, I am afraid I don't really understand the question nor do I know its proper context, since I live in a country where most of these reasons seem to be irrelevant.

For eg: We are all too technology-oriented and start forgetting our own ethics. Like someone pointed out, "Why do it when the appliances can do it for me?"
Our family is pretty well-off, and yet any appliances for housework beyond a washing machine is looked upon as an excess. Even that is only used for big or particularly dirty pieces, like bed sheets and all. We do our own dishes, clean our own rooms, wash our own everyday clothes, even if we don't actually need to do it ourselves, because excess is to be avoided at all costs.

But from the other replies, I think I have gleaned some things that do apply to our own country as well.

Any kind of ethics, is so hard to find nowadays.

People are too busy chasing after things to take joy in their jobs or studies. They are too wrapped up in the life they want to pay any attention to the life they have.

Why give something your hundred percent when it doesn't give you an adequate amount of satisfaction back, right?

Work is work, study is study.
Work isn't getting a job done well, studying isn't learning.
Its just business. You work because of a salary. You study and get marks because you need a job and the salary to live.

Just as an example: A good college admission requires at least 80% marks here, and the seats are usually filled within 90-95%. Brilliance is becoming too commonplace. And yet, most of these 'toppers' can't answer some easy questions when they are presented from a practical point of view, which they should have been able to do since they went through all those lessons, if they had actually tried to understand and not just mug up.

We are brought up nowadays with a whole set of different rules. Asking questions is not good, just follow what the others do and take the path of least resistance. Don't try to stand out when it doesn't reap you any benefit. Kill your creativity and any idea of doing something differently. Just get through life so you can afford that house, that car, that this and a thousand other things you don't really want, but have to get to keep up with the world.

And along this rat race, all your own work ethics are forgotten.
"I should clean this up" becomes "Let someone else clean the mess up. Why should I? I have better things to do." Peple atre too concentrated on the 'I' and 'Me's to look beyond their own self.

Elizabeth

I must say that I agree with everyone who has posted on this topic so far! I think that everyone (at least where I live) has the mentality of "someone else will do it for me" when really, if everyone thinks this way, it will never get done because we are all looking at each other waiting for someone to do it. By doing this, people are set up for a mediocre life where they are content with the minimums. People are no longer motivated to do things because they don't think that it will make a difference if they are productive or not because once again: someone or something will do it for them.

This brings me into technology. With more and more new technology coming out everyday, the less people have to do to "get by." Parents do not pay ANY attention to their kids anymore. For example, I hate it when I am in the store and I see parents who are on their cell phone while their kid is causing all kinds of trouble for everyone else. Also, parents buy their kids ipads and cell phones when they are around five years old (give or take a few years) so their kids never learn how to not rely on them because they have had them their entire lives. Then when the kid goes into school, they are already too involved with technology that they find that they don't have to put in a lot of effort to get by.

There are a lot of excellent examples of people who are like this at my school. By the time that these technology reliant kids reach high school, they have already mastered the art of getting by. They don't care about going to college or having an education but more about things that won't matter like drama. Recently, we were picking our classes for next year and people were taking deficiencies in their academic credits so that they can take more electives insttead of things like foreign languages which most colleges require to get accepted. Most teenagers just care about graduating by doing the least amount of work possible. This sets all of society up for being lazy and never moving forward in the things that really matter.

I really liked what Mamimi and Orianna said about how people think that they deserve things that they haven't earned. I think a big reason for people thinking this way is because of society becoming so lenient about everything and making it so that people don't feel bad when they don't succeed. Orianna mentioned welfare and other government policies that bales people out. These things would be great if people did not intentionally make it look like they couldn't live without it and try to stay on it as long as possible. Perfectly capable people try to collect money from society and take it away from those who just need it to get back on their feet. It makes people think that it is okay to collect what everyone else has earned and they don't have remorse about it which is sad.