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Closeness with the God of Israel is sought through prayer, Torah study, Jewish cultural rites, and adherence to God's mitzvot (divine laws). Olam ha-ba can also refer more generally to the afterlife, and there is debate concerning the order of Jewish eschatological events. Because humankind is driven by both positive and negative influences, Confucianists see a goal in achieving virtue through strong relationships and reasoning, as well as minimizing the negative. Mohism promoted a philosophy of impartial caring—a person should care equally for all other individuals, regardless of their actual relationship with them. When combined with more effective training, a sound personal assessment as to the meaning of one's life should be straightforward.citation needed

• Griffin and Tyrrell have proven empirically that when sufficient needs are met an individual will enjoy mental and physical health, unless there is damage or toxicity in the environment.
• Zoroastrians believe in a universe created by a transcendent God, Ahura Mazda, to whom all worship is ultimately directed.
• Maybe other ways for memorising the story may be discovered, but in environments subject to common chemical processes, common methods are likely to emerge.

The knowledge disclosed by modern science has effectively rewritten humankind's relationship to the natural world. Camus writes of value-nihilists such as Meursault, but also of values in a nihilistic world, that people can instead strive to be "heroic nihilists", living with dignity in the face of absurdity, living with "secular saintliness", fraternal solidarity, and rebelling against and transcending the world's indifference. The French philosopher Albert Camus asserts that the absurdity of the human condition is that people search for external values and meaning in a world which has none and is indifferent to them. Seeing the nihilist as a natural result of the idea that God is dead, and insisting it was something to overcome, his questioning of the nihilist's life-negating values returned meaning to the Earth.

Humanism aims to promote enlightened self-interest and the common good for all people. Likewise, "values and realities" are determined "by means of intelligent inquiry" and "are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience", that is, by critical intelligence. Humans have three ways of resolving the dilemma as beings looking for meaning in a meaningless world. For Friedrich Nietzsche, life is worth living only if there are goals inspiring one to live.

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As such, one's ethical prime directives are action, freedom, and decision, thus, existentialism opposes rationalism and positivism. Some theists further hold that if there were no God to give life ultimate meaning, value, and purpose, then life would be absurd. Pragmatic philosophers suggest that the practical, useful understanding of life is more important than searching for an impractical abstract truth about life. Pragmatism originated in the late-19th-century US, concerning itself (mostly) with truth, and positing that "only in struggling with the environment" do data, and derived life science content marketing theories, have meaning, and that consequences, like utility and practicality, are also components of truth.

Kant is known for his deontological theory, where there is a single moral obligation, the "Categorical Imperative", derived from the concept of duty. Devotion and subservience to God were largely replaced by notions of inalienable natural rights and the potentialities of reason, and universal ideals of love and compassion gave way to civic notions of freedom, equality, and citizenship. Stoicism's prime directives are virtue, reason, and natural law, abided to develop personal self-control and mental fortitude as means of overcoming destructive emotions. There is no afterlife, yet, one need not fear death, because "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."

Improved knowledge of brain function should result in better treatments producing healthier brains. George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics and philosophy, advances the view that metaphors are the usual basis of meaning, not the logic of verbal symbol manipulation. Embodied cognition uses the neurological basis of emotion, speech, and cognition to understand the nature of thought. On the whole, the therapeutic response is that the question itself—what is the meaning of life?

Happiness depends upon being self-sufficient and mastering one's mental attitude; suffering results from false judgments of value, which cause negative emotions and a concomitant vicious character. To the name, there is an almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. This involves achieving eudaemonia, usually translated as "happiness", "well-being", "flourishing", and "excellence".

Friedrich Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world, and especially human existence, of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, and essential value; succinctly, nihilism is the process of "the devaluing of the highest values". According to Kant, the maxim of this action results in a contradiction in conceivability (and thus contradicts perfect duty). This is a contradiction because if it were a universal action, no person would lend money anymore, as they know that they will never be paid back. Simply put, the test is that one must universalize the maxim—i.e., imagine that all people acted this way—and then see if it would still be possible to perform it in the world without contradiction. Kantians believe all actions are performed in accordance with some underlying maxim or principle, and for actions to be ethical, they must adhere to the categorical imperative.

This is why the good has rightly been defined as the object of all endeavor …Everything is done with a goal, and that goal is "good". Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and choice of action, is thought to have some good as its object. Aristotle, an apprentice of Plato, was another early and influential philosopher, who argued that ethical knowledge is not certain knowledge (such as metaphysics and epistemology), but is general knowledge. Wong has proposed that whether life is meaningful depends not only on subjective feelings but, more importantly, on whether a person's goal-striving and life as a whole is meaningful according to some objective normative standard.

Proponents of this view cite accounts of paranormal phenomena, primarily extrasensory perceptions and psychic powers, as evidence for an incorporeal higher consciousness. Explaining the process of free will through quantum phenomena is an alternative to determinism. Quantum mind theories use quantum theory in explaining certain properties of the mind. Electromagnetic theories of consciousness solve the binding problem of consciousness in saying that the electromagnetic field generated by the brain is the actual carrier of conscious experience; there is however disagreement about the implementations of such a theory relating to other workings of the mind. On the other hand, some scientists, like Andrei Linde, have considered that consciousness, like spacetime, might have its own intrinsic degrees of freedom, and that one's perceptions may be as real as (or even more real than) material objects.