So, what's the meaning of life? What's our purpose, what are we supposed to do in that space between being conceived and dying? Why are we alive in the first place?
I do not believe in the christian God, and I do not subscribe to their purported ideas of creation and a greater plan. To my humble and surely sacrilegious self, every animal and plant on our planet has a base life purpose: to propogate their species. Everything else revolves around that one goal, that one meaning. The species must be kept alive, which means that one must eat and find shelter and fight enemies, and one must produce young. To be sure, the human species started out that way as well. We fought tooth and nail, we adapted, and we reproduced. Now, fast forward through the centuries to modern times. We have built, through millenia, a System, a way of life, that enables us to survive from Day 1. There are standards of life, yes. There are levels of qualities of life, yes. But in "modern" countries, the fate of our species as a whole is no longer a huge issue. It's a given that we'll survive. To be honest, at this point in time, we'd be better off if people would stop reproducing so damn much. We've made it so easy to live that it has actually become a problem.
So our original life purpose has been destroyed, by ourselves. The civilizations, the societies, the religions, the schools...all the things that were created to better our odds of survival, what purpose do they serve if survival is no longer our primary directive?
Rewind again. Of all the animals that walked the earth, mankind rose to the top, so to speak. Somewhere along the evolutionary chain, we stood up, we got opposable thumbs, and we got some massive brainage. Somewhere along the evolutionary chain, we became sentient. With our sentience, with our new sense of self-awareness (and by that i mean not simply awareness of self, but awareness of self in relation to the Whole), we CREATED. We thought, and we applied our thoughts to reality, and we thought some more. We created philosophy, and medicine, and science. We took the natural world and filed it and ordered it into a zillion separate folders. We labeled notions and molded them to our wills. We literally bent the world beneath our will. And with this power of human creation, we wrote ourselves out of natural law.
Now, our most primitive and base concerns are superfluous. Medicine saves our offspring, the government feeds us, and the land is one huge superstructure of shelters. The unity that was created from the need to survive is no longer necessary. So the question is, what is life's purpose when the world we are born into is meaningless?
I would say we have made great progress since our days as hunters and gatherers, but I am not sure that is true. What constitutes "progress"? If, back then in the distant past, a man was asked "what is your purpose in life?" and he had been able to actually answer, are we truly more advanced now? Ask the average person today what their life purpose is, and they would be lost for an answer. Even the life goals of the modern world serve no real purpose. With no immediate concern for our future as a species, we've become self-absorbed, to the point where none of our "achievements" have any bearing on the future after our death. Unfortunately, a side effect of being sentient is realizing that there IS a future after our death. But, should we be concerned with the future at all at this point? Other than the fact that we're killing our planet, none of it has any bearing on US at all. WE'll all die before our inaction has any effect. So what does it matter?
So then, we're back at the beginning. What's the point? Why get married and have children when the arhaic concept of "marriage" is no longer necessary, and children are a dime a dozen? The world is overpopulated. And for that matter, we can raise a child on our own, or with a dozen partners, or with our immediate families. The need for a protector has expired, the reason for families gone. Why do we live in cities? The only threats to our safety are other humans, and really those are all problems we started anyway. Why go to school, get a degree, and go into a field? Name me a field that's useful in the future. Name me one professional field that isn't contributing to the destruction of our home and our species. Even medicine is killing us off, in the long run. Eventually we'll inadvertantly create a supervirus that will be unstoppable. But there's no way to stop it, either. It's like being on a train and knowing that the tracks end over a cliff. There're no brakes. So if we're all doomed, and our achievements are paltry and useless, what could possibly be the meaning of life?
And here sits our society. On the brink of International Existentialism. We've all come to this realization, whether we've admitted it or not. Humanity has thought itself into a corner. The value of an individual life has decreased vastly. Really, what is 1 in billions? The people who face this question, in one form or another, come to the conclusion that nothing matters, so why not just do whatever makes you happy? That's a good reason for living. To be happy. To love. To be loved. Whatever.
But even then, that's apathy. And isn't apathy and selfisness contributing to the problem? Thousands, millions, billions of human souls lose the unity that made us the power we are on earth. And if we aren't part of a greater whole, what are we? Individuals, lost and without purpose, devoid of meaning, and in the end, forced to create our own.
After all, creating is what humanity does best.
3 comments:
You make some interesting points, and I can sense much frustration in this post. When trying to look at it all, it can certainly seem completely frustrating, and overwhelming.
Nevertheless, you do make many assumptions as well, and many of your premises do not have evidence. As such, there is an overall lack of development here.
But I'm sure you weren't trying to write a thesis here either, so I in turn am making the assumption that impecable reasoning was not the purpose of your post.
My arguments would most likely come from the direction that you should not count out the human impetus for the positive. It is true that many times humans tend towards the negative, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Yet many people endeavor to do the opposite, and live life in a positive manner. And so it is that there is a duality in existence, which hangs in a delicate balance.
For most of us, being able to live in the world means to live in dualities. That does not mean, however, that a dualistic existence is all that there is, and all that we can attain.
That's getting a bit specific though, and I feel I'm digressing. I'm not going to try and address all of your premises, as there are too many. However, your original issue in question is the purpose of life. A question that perhaps every thinking person in history has tried to answer.
I would propose, without providing evidence here either, that perhaps the answer lies within the question itself: the purpose in life is to find a purpose in life.
And that, may also mean that each persons purpose in life is unique.
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From a philosophical standpoint, i completely agree with you. But that's assuming that our higher brain power makes us different in some significant way than every other living thing. My point is that just because we can think, we shouldn't write ourselves out of the natural order of things. And the natural order of things is Life hinging on the survival of the species. We have the luxury of being able to think in terms of duality and complicated purposes, and to think ourselves in circles all we want. And I really love that ability. But I do think that the loss of our perspective of our place in the world has contributed to the loss of the value of our lives. And thus, to the loss of any true Life Purpose we could have had as a whole.
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