When I was 17 the question "what's the purpose/meaning of life" came across my mind. As a high school student in China my life was 100% defined by school life, getting a better score and eventually fight my way to college was the only goal I and most of my peer students had in our first 18 years of lives. Obviously getting into college isn't a real meaning of life, it's just a social obligation that we were one way or another forced to comply. So I questioned myself, what is the meaning of life, why do we come down to earth and go through all these? More worryingly, since we all die one day, glory, fame, pleasure, pain, sorrow, everything will be gone, does what we do in our life really matter that much?
I didn't find an answer and quickly I forgot that question.
Now I want to continue to ask myself the same question, what's the purpose of life? Still, I can't come up with anything better qualified as a good answer than I could 7 years ago, despite everything I've been through in between. But maybe we could use another approach to solve the puzzle here, let me ask myself: what is it that bring up the question in my mind and what is it that made the question so invisible sometimes(how come can I ignore the question for the most of the time of my life while it seemed so significant)?
We don't think about the purpose of life because we usually are too busy dealing with more micro-scoped purposes on a daily basis instead of worrying about the "ultimate" question. Suppose in the morning we wake up, feeling hungry, eat breakfast, usually there is no chance for anything philosophical to come up because of the instant physiological desire was occupying our mind. Then we sit down to work or to study, to accomplish some tasks, our mind again is too busy. Until we finally finish work, there're again so many other things to do such as entertain ourselves or socializing with people, who would think of the meaning of life? We have plenty of instant desires, short-term or middle-term goals and plans waiting for us to fulfill 24/7, there's really little time to chase all the way down the line to find out what's on the end of it.
We eat to better work, we work to gain power(money), we then use our gained power to better our lives in our own certain ways, then what?
Let me list some of the "purpose" I can think of here:
1.Being happy, having a satisfying happy life, full of smile, kindness, warmth
2.To explore the world and acquire as much knowledge as possible
3.To Make other people's life better, be a better person in society
4.To make contribution to humanity as a whole, such as inventing new technology, advocate equality, to change the world
5.To experience as many things as possible, fully live the life
...
and if you search "purpose of life" you can find a lot of pictures as such:
The list and examples can go on and on, but another question comes up, must there be a universal purpose of life, or is it really depend on the individual? If I happen to be an athlete, then my purpose is obviously to do the best in my sport and spread the sportsman's spirit across the world. But then again why would I do that? Because it is good to influence people and ourselves.
We can also break down the purpose into two categories, one is self-center purpose, another is social-center purpose. Which one is more important? It all comes down to the ultimate question "what matters?"
Not just what matters "to you", or what matters "to me", here we simply consider "what matters". As long as it matters, it is a purpose, it is meaningful, to you or to others. Because "purpose" and "meaning" are very human concepts, only our human mind will be subject to these concepts, we give meanings to things, we put purpose on things, and we perceive the world in a "with-meaning-way". Therefore whatever matters to human being, can be qualified as a purpose or a description of meaning of life.
You may say, wait, without human, there is still purpose, like a bird has wings, is for the purpose of flying! Wrong, we see purpose in this matter is because we are very used to the "purpose" thinking pattern, to us "everything must have a purpose", yet we often ignore the fact that the universe evolves simply this way and things simply extends this way and without human, there's no subject looking back and say "oh hey, birds' wings are for flying", instead, the universe thinks "the kind of animal developed wings and therefore they start flying". Do you see the difference of human mind and universe mind? The universe mind "thinks" in a forward manner, it simply observe the fact. While human mind on the contrary look at things in a backward manner, it goes back to question, why do birds have wings?
When we cannot directly answer the "ultimate" question, "what is the meaning of life", the metaphysical form of the questioning decided the fact that there's no intuitive way to grasp the question, therefore we tend to put more concrete things in the position of our purpose.
So, again the question troubled me many years ago: why do we do all the things we do today despite the fact that one day we will die? Answer: it doesn't matter ----- to whom dies, but it will matter to whom lives on.
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