Is there a meaning to life?

Back when I was in my highschool, we had 'Catechism Class' a kind of religious lesson especially of Catholic Dogma on Sunday. One of defining questions we are taught was 'who made you and why did God made you?' The answer of course was God made me, to know him, to love him and serve him on this earth and to enjoy with him in afterlife. This seems quite simple and answer the questions: 'what is the purpose of life' for a young catholic boy in me back then.

Technically, meaning and purpose may not be the same but for simplicity as in most case 'meaning of something is derived from its purpose' per say and here on I would use them interchangeably. Throughout human history and every individual we are grapple with the questions "What is the meaning of  Life and often we wonder if there is actually ang meaning or purpose in our life?' 

Various philosopher has postulated what they consider is a meaning of life. A very famous concept is 'Essentialism' propounded by Greek philosopher such as Plato and Aristotle which basically means a things or person is made up of certain determine essence or basic properties which define it as it is. For example how do you define a mobile phones? Though now it has become a trend for mobile phones to have high quality camera, good multimedia interface and comes with many other functionalities, a mobile phones is a device through which we can talk to someone and which can carry around freely else it's not it.

However, in 19th century a new concept 'Existentialism' was propounded by Danish Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and became very popular after world war 2 from the works of Jean-Paul Sarte. 'Existentialism' in simple terms means that there is no pre-define meaning to something until meaning is assign to it, meaning our life has no meaning till we decided to give it a meaning. Taking our previous examples mobile phones, the same device can have different meanings and purpose and it can be a mobile phones, a camera, a gaming modules, multimedia outlets depending on how we assign and use it for according to existentialism.

So, what is the meaning of life? Does it has some pre-define meaning as in 'essentialism' or do we has to assign meaning and purpose to our life as in 'Existentialism' or if there is no meaning in life after all as in Nihilism. If after all life has a pre-define purpose what is it, does it means to know, love and serve God as I was taught in my Catechism class or after all if we had to ascribe meaning to life what would be it? Would the meaning of life be same for individual, a community and as a species. Is it that the ultimate goal of life is to extend the survival of our own species which we human as a species has fare well despite several natural and man-made calamities such as diseases and war.

However, hard it is to answer the questions 'what is the meaning of life?', we can all chose to be a good responsible human and hope to find answer somewhere down the path. We can  choose to be compassionate, humble and truthful in our living and leave the worrying about what is the meaning of life to moment such as this lockdown days. After all as a saying goes: 'If you can be anything, be Kind', we can choose to be a little more kinder with ourselves, to others and most importantly to Nature in this way we can live our life more fruitful. Maybe after all the meaning of life is but a quest to live the life.