What I think also happens, is that if you find that your own life has come up short of expectations, then it becomes quite easy to slip into a "life is meaningless mode".
Sort of a race to to bottom kind of thing. Kinda becomes a mantra. Life is meaningless", but really it's saying something different. But that truth can be harder to face. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote : "Meaning" is a human invention, and one that as far as I can tell has no relationship to reality on any level or in any universe. If meaning is just a human invention (and not something handed down from a higher power) then what difference does that make to the disillusioning effect of the Many Worlds Theory? If all possible worlds exist then whatever you freely choose as a path to give your life its own personal value and meaning - becoming a humanitarian, producing beautiful works of art, combatting injustice, searching for truth via science and philosophy, etc - is invalidated in the other possible worlds. The Many Worlds Theory is nihilism magnified to infinity. Every combination of particles exists somewhere - values don't come into the equations. Although you (Barry) are happy to dispense with any overarching meaning to life, the apparent senselessness of life clearly leads to an existential crisis for many others. Are those searching for direction in life just weaklings? Perhaps they intuit that something vital has been ignored by reductive science. Now one big advantage of seeing life as lacking any inherent meaning is that our existence can then be viewed as a game. Now we like games. Games can be fun. So our lives can be lived out in a playful spirit. (And I've nothing against fun and games!) But when we come face to face with the horrors of our fellow humans playing the game by an alien code - kidnapping women to be sold into sex slavery, burning POWs alive, committing genocide - it becomes tricky to simply regard those others as doing nothing more than playing the Game of Life by a different set of rules.
