It has been said that the three big questions of life are: “where did we come from?,” “where are we going?,” and “why are we here?” Another question that’s often asked is “who are we?” I think all these questions are related to the meaning of life. I think many people search for the meaning of life, but what are they searching for? When someone says they’re looking for the meaning of life, I think what they're looking for is some purpose of their life or some purpose of the world.

Many people have tried to find some purpose in life that is common to everyone. Some people say the purpose of life is just to experience being alive, some say it’s to live a good life and get married and have children, while others say it’s to find spiritual enlightenment. Then there are even others who say that there is no ultimate purpose for anything, we’re just here because of evolution, and any purpose we can have is just for our individual lives. I think whatever someone believes, we all still feel like we want an answer to the question. But even if we can agree that there could be a purpose to our lives, how can we go about finding it?

There are many ways or practices that could help us to find the purpose of our lives. One way is to spend time asking yourself questions and finding passions that could help you discover your purpose. Another way is to spend time with those you love and time helping others. Another way is to study religion and philosophy to see what other people have discovered about the purpose of life. Finally, you can follow a spiritual practice such as prayer or meditation that could help you understand more about the purpose of life.

One interesting way to approach the question of the meaning of life is to ask older people or people close to dying what they think. Elderly people have a lot of experience they could share, and people close to death probably would have a totally different perspective than a young person who is busy every day thinking about school grades and video games, like me. In fact, some researchers and authors have had a similar idea.

Bronnie Ware was a palliative nurse, which is a nurse that cares for terminally ill patients. She wrote a best-selling memoir called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Even though the book is about death, it is still very positive and hopeful and has some good lessons for us. By knowing what the common regrets are, we can use that information to avoid making the same mistakes and to help us in our search for what is meaningful in life.

According to Bronnie Ware, the top five regrets are:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

I wish I had let myself be happier.

Even though we might not find out the secret of life on our first attempts, we can try to go in the direction of what we think will make a meaningful life. For example, we can try to pay more attention to our true feelings and how we can express them, we can focus less on being obsessed with work and more on spending time with our friends and family, and we can try letting ourselves feel more gratitude and happiness in our lives.