The search for meaning

[Amnesiac42]

hey, first post, don't eat me. to return to the first question, what gives other people's lives meaning? or something to that tune.

personally, and this may sound a bit corny, but i was at a wedding not too long ago, and i got bored one of these nights and went out on the beach. the sky was perfectly clear, very little light pollution. in fact, it's the clearest sky that i've ever seen. i saw a shooting star every 15 minutes on average (or per 3 songs on my mp3 player). and looking up at the stars, i was just thinking about how mind boggling the size of the universe is. and so i started thinking about conscienceness as perhaps an extension of things (you could think of the blanket in I (heart) Huckabees). And I thought, well, even if my conscienceness may be a biological adaptation or just an indenture of some sort in reality, then it really doesn't matter because it's still what i have.

so I guess what gives my life some meaning, or reason not to just up and kill myself, is that i have (as we all do) this gift of conscienceness. And even though there may be suffering at times, i still have the ability to recognize it, and that alone opens a lot of options for me for any given situation. and even if one dies and conscienceness follows, then it still isn't a big deal because i'm aware of what's happening and i have what a tree doesn't. if that makes any sense at all.

oh, and also someone said -
there is no "right" side to be on, whether its good or evil. they are both just as necessary as each other. the main thing that is important is the balance between the two. true understanding can only be reached from seeing life from both sides.

i don't think good and evil are necessary at all. i think that good and evil are really just concepts imposed upon reality by people. i know i'm not alone there. i think a lot of people try to argue that there are universal goods and evils. for example, killing another human is evil. well, i would argue that killing another human is simply unethical and pointless, therefor would naturally seem to one to be a perverse behavior. yes, it's "evil" but that's because we make it so. animals kill each other all of the time. but to them, it's good because they have to survive. it's a survival issue, killing, duh. but what is good?