2012 – 6th Grade National 3rd Place Winner

Derek Martinez, Florida.

What is the meaning of life ?

“Why do we eat cheese anyway?”
Imagine this, you are walking into your local Publix, scanning the aisles. Then, you find it a bag of perfectly sliced cheese. So you pay for your cheese and leave the store. Now what? Why did you buy your cheese and waste $6.50 of your hard earned money on cheese? What are you going to do with your cheese? You are going to eat it or use it in anyway you want. That is the reason the store even sells cheese for you to eat it. Everything has a meaning, big or small in this case “what is the meaning of life”. The meaning of life is to figure out what makes you happy.

I don’t mean to live as in eating and sleeping, but as in finding your individual reason. Epicuras, the philosopher once said in order to live a good life you must have happiness, then he explained that happiness can only be found by obtaining 1. friends, 2. freedom, and 3. an analyzed life. Not everyone agrees that these three things can give them exactly what they want, mainly because in our current generation freedom and an analyzed life are very hard to get due to laws, jobs, and other things related to that. Aristotle said that to gain happiness one must have a life of knowledge. But this rule doesn’t apply to everyone, someone may find happiness in work, this has nothing in common with what any of the two philosophers said. You may buy your cheese for one specific reason, another person buy the same cheese but for another cause, you choose what makes you happy to find out why you were specifically given a reason to your life.

Nobody enjoys pain, sadness or any other bad emotion we have, but everyone loves to be happy so if whoever/whatever didn’t mean for out lives to be happy then they did a very bad job because every person with a life has more than enough chances of finding their true meaning of life. So if for whatever reason you get tired of what you think your reason is then you can find another other of the million ways to find happiness. To explain with another example of cheese, if you think that you are getting tired of American cheese you may change and get Swiss cheese instead.

Since our lives on Earth are very short, why would you waste time getting sidetracked if you know that your life can be taken at any moment in time. The meaning of life is to find what makes you happy.

 

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