Grand Meanings of Human Life

Fundamentally, meaning of human life is derived from basic human instincts of survival, progress and procreation with the purposes of living a lifespan and continuing it through generations in line with natural design. These are natural demands of life applicable to all known forms of life, but human life has evolved differently from what natural life is, as a superset of natural life. This means that the human life includes all that what nature demands from life plus a few things more. The cause of the additional things is the evolution of human intellect to a high level as compared to that of the other forms of life. This has caused evolution of three more instincts in humans.

Memory - Memorizing experiential information and using it whenever needed,

Curiosity - Being curious, hence making efforts to know things in vicinity, and

Imagination - Imagining what is non-existent and trying to develop them

Directly and indirectly, all these three additional instincts aim at improving quality of human life. Therefore, a meaning of life may be contributing to improve quality of human life. With this idea, let us examine some meanings of life through basic and additional instincts of humans.

Basic Meanings

Survival

The human experience proves that lifespan of an individual form of life can't be endless. Thus, every birth is complemented by a death. Therefore, survival is not the meaning of life but a healthy survival can be the meaning of life to an individual. For this, the individual is required to take care of health resilience and agility which are included in true meaning of good health.

Progress

In living beings and also in every organic system, regular changes are inevitable. These changes may be for betterment of the system or for its decay. Therefore, even for avoiding decay, betterment has to be adopted to by an individual in his/her life as an organic system. This betterment is renamed as progress through which the individual seeks and creates more and more convenience and comforts of life.

Humans have made rapid strides in this respect but many such efforts have become counter-productive for their adverse effects on health resilience and agility. Therefore, a balance between health and progress has to be made through trade-off between the two. For some individuals, this may be the purpose of life.

Procreation

Humans procreate with the intention of surviving after death through respective generations carrying their genes. Thus, genes appear to be immortal providing an apparent immortality to an individual. But this can't be ensured as a break in procreation of generations may be possible at any stage for various reasons. Secondly, marriages introduce amalgamation of genes from different sources, therefore, after a few generations, the original individual's genes may be present in individuals in part only. Say, a new born may have facial features of his/her one ancestor, body structure of another, characteristics of some other ancestor, etc. Therefore, the individual's set of genes gets lost through permutations and combinations of genes from different individuals down the generation chain.

Thirdly, with continuity of a certain practice different from the original practice for three or more generations, the genes undergo modifications. This upsets continuity of genetic inheritance from an ancestor.

Thus, surviving through genetic inheritance can't be the purpose of life for an individual. Through procreation, an individual can only contribute toward continuity of life on earth.

Procreation being futile for an individual for immortality through genetic inheritance, the humanity has successfully sought another purpose of getting sexual pleasure in process similar to that of procreation. Therefore, all sexual intercourses of humans don't aim at procreation which is the case with other forms of life. This makes sexual pleasure as a possible purpose of life for some individuals.

Advanced Meanings

Propagating Human Experience

Lifespan of memory records of experiences of an individual may be extended through transfer of information through generations for taking advantages of these for betterment of human life. Creating written records of experiential information through use of languages, enhances this process further. Therefore, propagation of human experience to the future generations may be a purpose of life for some individuals. Some authors may be working with this contention.

Probing the Unknown

Human instinct of curiosity may compel some individuals to improve human knowledge base through efforts for knowing the unknown. The science behind this process is to probe the unknown through what is known. This may be the meaning of life for some individuals benefitting those who seek more knowledge.

Imaginative Innovation

Human capability of imagining what is non-existent until that time works for seeding innovations through lateral thinking for improving quality of human life, but this has potential for misuse too for creating like atomic weapons to destroy a part or the whole of humanity. Whatever be the case, this may be the meaning of life for some individuals leafing to more innovations in the world which may improve or decay quality of human life.

The Grand Purpose of Life

We have seen above that various meanings of life have some potential subscribers for their own choices and provide benefits in their limited ways. Therefore, the humanity is in a process of differentiation for pursuance of different meanings of life based on basic or advanced instincts by different persons. No purpose is capable of taking the whole humanity to a higher level. In the process, some humans pursuing their basic instincts as their meaning of life may remain what they are today or even get degraded. Others pursuing their advanced instincts for their meaning of life with the basic instincts relegated to routines of life may evolve further. As a result, the humanity would get divided into humans and super-humans. This takes some of us to pursue a grand meaning of life to evolve to super-human level through conscious pursuance of advanced meanings of life.

This point of further evolution of only a part of humanity is supported by the evolution process so far wherein only parts of species have been evolving to higher levels under circumstantial differentials. Even the humans evolved from species still existing on earth in their forms of pre-human evolution. Differentials in circumstance and practices keep on creating diversity in evolution levels within each species of life, thus giving rise to multiple species from a single species.  

To summarise, the whole of this treatise, those willing to evolve to super-humanism must consciously pursue their capabilities of memorizing and recording human experiences, curiosity to improve upon the human knowledge base, and imaginative creativity, while the basic instincts of survival, progress and procreation get pursued through their routines. Those who fail to do so and keep on relying on the basic instincts only would remain as ordinary humans.