[dabomb2223]

Good question(s). Here's what I think.

What am I doing here?
This can be interpreted two different ways: first, a question more similar to "what is my purpose?" or second, the literal meaning of the question. The answer to the second version is easy, you're doing whatever you choose to do at this time, which for this exact moment is reading this post. The answer to the first version, however, is a little more complicated. Depending on where you were born, how you were raised, who you associate with, etc., your purpose varies drastically. For instance, if you believe in a higher power your purpose may be to do things that please said higher power. Maybe you're an altruist and your life's purpose is to make the lives of everyone you come in contact with easier/better. Or perhaps you're like me and you believe that your life's purpose is whatever you make of it. That there is no inherent purpose to us being here, we just are. We're a living statistical improbability - so improbable, in fact, that many of us realize this and conclude that the only way we could exist is if we have a purpose. In the end, it's up to you to decide what your purpose is. Is it something you can choose? Is it something that's decided for you based on what you believe? Or is life totally meaningless and the best course of action is suicide to escape the absurdity of life? Your choice.

How does anything even exist?
Short answer: No one knows. Long answer: No one knows, but humanity as a species has seen as far back as can be seen (to our knowledge). What we see at that point (search cosmic microwave background) leads us to believe that stuff existed before that point. Which brings us to the current leading theory: At the beginning of the universe, all matter and energy was condensed into a point a million, billion, billion times smaller than a single atom. Then it exploded and expanded over about 14 billion years to become the universe we know today. How everything got there? We don't know. Why it exploded into the universe we know today? No clue. Could it be possible that stuff happened before everything was in a single point? Absolutely. Everything exists and we don't know how or why.

What is life?
You could answer this question in a variety of ways. You could recite the biological definition of life, being anything that grows and consumes and reacts to its environment. You could break it down into chemistry, and say that life is merely an emergent property of the billions of tiny chemical reactions that occur within an organism. You could answer with sociology and say that "life" is merely a term that humans use to classify the universe and split it into categories, and it's as meaningful and arbitrary as classifying things by color or shape or temperature at which they freeze. You could answer philosophically and say that life is a condition (the human condition) which we all suffer from whose symptoms are pain, joy, experience, and death. We as living creatures are merely hosts for an infectious disease (for lack of a better term) that feeds on us and motivates us to propagate it further through reproduction. Or you could answer with a conglomeration of knowledge from a myriad of subjects and just say: Life IS.

Like most things in life, these questions don't have answers that are black and white. Rather, their answers vary between a wide spectrum of grays, some of which please an individual's worldview, others bring disgust and dismay. It's our damnation as conscious individuals to decide which answer we accept as truth.

wait this isn't critical thinking. Please read though, I like what I've written here.