What is reality?

What we can sense with our senses? Then so called "hallucinations" are real.

Where do we make the distinction between what is real and what is a hallucination, and how? How do we know?

Maybe this "life" is one mind-blowing hallucination.

Sometimes I feel like this (reality?) isn't real, like I'm detatched from everything. Emotionally dead. Maybe that's normal, sometimes.

Maybe I think too much...

Now that I've got you in the right (philosophical) frame of mind-ish, the other day, a good friend of mine, one whom I constantly have deep philosophical discussions with, asked me why we live. What is the meaning of life? What is the "objective" of life, if we just live once and then die forever (we're both athiests)? I told him he was looking at life from a very objective standpoint and life isn't like that, that you make your own meaning in life. He responded that he wants to live life without deceiving himself (insert religious analogue here) and that making your own meaning in life is deceptive in itself. Life has no purpose. So I asked him, "Why are we living, then, if we have no purpose or meaning other than to grow and flourish"?

He couldn't answer me.

What MY answer is, is our purpose here (again making my own meaning in life) is to make the biggest mark possible.

Plant a tree, in 100+ years that tree is a home for more life. A home and a mark you made on life. Someone will look at that tree and wonder who planted it and you will live on in spirit!

We went on to talk about happiness and if that was the objective of life, to live the happiest life possible.

how do we attain happiness?

to attain something, first you have to define it.

So, I ask you, the humble reader, what IS happiness? is it a simple fulfillment of needs? is it basic satisfaction, and if so, should we spend our lives trying to be completely satisfied in every way possible?

Thanks for taking the time to read these, and please, give me your opinion.