Meaning of life

If plant somehow has a desire to live, then obviously animal life show even more desire to live. But I am not thinking about the animals we see around every day. When I thought about animal life when I was a teen, I thought about animals without brains. They were single cell animals, such as bacteria. They moved around. They found food. They reproduced. Was there a goal? Certainly! To stay alive. Then the same question came: why do they desire to live? If their appearance on Earth was just an accident, how can this accident “create” the desire to live?

Can science explain all these one day? I was not sure. There was no tangible object that we could touch and called it “desire”. Science could only explain material objects, was it?

Yet another more pressing question came to me:

What is the meaning of life?

This question seemed to be impractical. It would not affect my school grade, my future career, wealth, or any other “important” thing in life. However, it just seemed to be the most important question to me! Why should I bother to work hard to sustain a life which might turn out to be meaningless? If I just wanted to satisfy my animal “instinct” to stay alive, then at least I did not need to be a good person. It was pointless to behave well, for it was much easier to be bad than good. Lied anytime I wanted was a lot easier than be honest at all times.

Should there be a meaning to life? It definitely should! There were countless features of a human body that aimed at sustaining the life of the owner of the body. The eyebrows kept falling debris and rainwater to drain down to the eye socket. The nervous system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, all of these helped maintain the life of the owner of the body. All of these systems and structures had a clear objective: to sustain life. Could it turn out that life, the ultimate goal of all these amazing features of a body, itself was actually meaningless? No, it was impossible.