Why should we be alive?
There's no cosmic memo assigning a reason, but living things, and we especially, build reasons as we go.
“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), the claim that meaning isn't handed down, it's made.
Two questions hiding in one
"Why should we be alive?" splits cleanly in half. One half is empirical: how did life arise and persist at all? The other is normative: given that we're here, what makes a life worth continuing? Mixing them up is where most confusion starts.
The empirical half: life keeps going because it's good at going
Biology doesn't offer a purpose, but it does explain persistence. Self-replicating chemistry that copies itself a little more reliably than its neighbors simply ends up more common. No goal required, just a feedback loop running for billions of years.
So the honest scientific answer to "why are we alive" is closer to "because the alternative didn't replicate." Useful, but it plainly doesn't settle the part of the question that actually keeps people up at night.
The normative half: meaning as something built
Philosophers have offered three broad shapes of answer. Theistic traditions locate purpose in a creator's intent. Nihilists argue there's no objective purpose at all. Existentialists and many humanists take a third path: purpose isn't discovered like a buried fact, it's authored through what we commit to.
Recent psychology backs the practical version of this. Studies of meaning in life consistently find it has ingredients we can influence: coherence (life makes sense), purpose (goals worth pursuing), and mattering (you count to someone). None of these require a cosmic warrant to be real.
A vessel that fills with what you pour in
Think of meaning less as a label stamped on existence and more as a container you fill. It starts empty, and it holds exactly what you put into it, relationships, curiosity, care for others, work that outlasts you.
Which reframes the original question. "Why should we be alive?" has no answer waiting in the universe to be found. The closest thing to an answer is the set of reasons you're willing to keep choosing, and that set is, for almost everyone, longer than it feels on the hard days.