When I’m unhappy, I feel like I’m doing life wrong. I’d rather be happy. But is happiness the point of life, or is there more to it? If I pursue happiness, mine first then for those around me, is that selfish? But if there’s a bigger purpose, then what about people with Alzheimer’s or dementia who can’t recall recent experiences or make plans?
Personally the point to life for me is to find something I love and add to that space. I love music, so my purpose in life is to make music, be that playing live or mixing and mastering or composing songs or recording stuff. It’s something I dream about, even though I already do some of these things.
But I’m just one guy. My personal subcribed to philosophy is absurdism. Nothing has meaning unless I give it meaning, so fuck you Im going to eat a pineapple with chopsticks.
The point to life is whatever you want it to be. If you need help finding that I would try tap into what you would love to create or what you would like to achieve.
The purpose of life is to not die.
Technically the truth.
The only objective purpose in life is to spread your genes. You share that same purpose with every other living thing.
Other than that, it’s up to you. My purpose in life is to keep my girlfriend happy and destroy as many jobs as I can. My career in industrial automation is the key to both.
The only objective purpose in life is to spread your genes.
Not even that. It’s not like you’ve failed at life if you don’t have kids. You just haven’t spread your genetic information. Saying that its your purpose to spread them implies it’s the genes purpose to be spread. Genes simply are, they don’t have a purpose just like you don’t; evolution has just given organisms behaviors and mechanisms that make it very likely that they will be regardless of that lack of purpose.
That’s a valid way of looking at it, too.
Realistically, the concept of “purpose” doesn’t exist in the universe outside of our imagination any more than justice, beauty, or morality. Things just are what they are and follow the laws of physics.
If we’re making it all up as we go along, there aren’t any wrong answers. I claim the purpose of living things is to reproduce, but it’s true that living things reproduce because that’s what living things do (otherwise we’d have run out of them by now). Kind of a chicken/egg thing there.
If society is an organism, you’re a somatic cell rather than a germ cell. You’re an important part of multicellular life!
It’s fun! And it pays well. Get your engineering or comp sci degree and give me a call.
The only objective purpose in life is to spread your genes. You share that same purpose with every other living thing.
That’s not my purpose; it’s my genes’ purpose.
(Similarly, any one of my somatic cells could “decide” to “pursue the goal” of spreading its own genes instead of cooperating with the other tissues and organs around it. We call that “cancer”.)
Okay, this is an interesting idea. I said purpose, but you said meaning. Aren’t those the same? Imagine I’m pursuing something pointless, like hedonistic pleasure. Why isn’t that meaningful? How can I determine if my actions are meaningful?
Determine is an ambiguous word, here, so I’m going to break it into two parts:
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You might discover that your actions are meaningful to others. Hedonic pleasure probably won’t be, but everyone is into something.
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You decide if something is meaningful to yourself.
Something doesn’t have to have a purpose to b meaningful; and something doesn’t have to be meaningful to have a purpose, or at least, not meaningful outside of that purpose. I can appreciate the buffing leaves on a tree in spring without needing those specific leaves o that tree for anything. I have several wooden spoons that serve me well in the kitchen but if they disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t notice or care.
To be clear: Meaning is internal, but purpose is some sort of external function, utility, or goal.
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LOL no. Happiness is an emotion, just like anger or sadness.
As for the purpose of life, there isn’t one. Or if you’re a philosophical nihilist, there isn’t an inherent meaning to life, so it’s up to each individual to come up with their own.
IMO try not to overthink it. Death still comes one to a customer so you might as well enjoy yourself while making the world a better (or at least not worse) place if you can.
Maybe I worded the question badly. Is happiness an indication that the world is a better place because I’m here? I think so, and I think that’s enough. Do you agree?
Not all life can have meaning or greater purpose, that happens in fiction mostly anyway.
Find things that make you comfortable, content and feel safe, and fill your life with them. It’s ok to just be.
But isn’t our life really just the story we tell ourselves about ourselves? I guess I’m trying to create a narrative arc, and your comment says to me: enjoy the exposition and character development; it’s enough.
Yeah but just like lives, not all stories are good. When you can’t change fundamental building blocks of your own story to create a pleasing narrative for yourself, all you can really do is exist in what there is. Most people exist like this.
Fighting your objective reality for an unobtainable greater meaning, will cause mental illness if you keep doing it. Come to terms with the real you as opposed to the ideal you, and make what you have for your life as nice for yourself as you can, while you can.
Save your desires for manifest destiny for your OC’s and write some stories about them or illustrate them or something.
I’d like my purpose to be to have many experiences and to embrace.
Consider reading “Existentialism is a Humanism”
There is no objective, defined purpose to life. People assign meaning and purpose to their life. Some people’s purpose is to live in the way that their religion asks them to, some want a legacy so their purpose is to leave their mark on the world, some people live to help others, some live to be happy, some live to experience the world, some live until they die and that’s it.
I’m no life coach, and I don’t know you. I can’t know if you’re selfish or not, and I don’t think there’s a bigger purpose. If you want the 2 cents of some random guy on the internet, try to live in whatever way brings you the fewest regrets. Everything can be taken to an extreme (even happiness), and there’s a tradeoff to everything.
The purpose of life isn’t clearly defined. That’s up to you, if being happy is a goal you want then go for it. My purpose in life is just to sustain my existence. That’s it. I work so I can pay to live and eat. And in my free time I do hobbies and things I like to entertain myself. Am I happy? I dunno, but I’m still here. That’s the best I can do. This life is all we have so might as well keep it going as long as you can.
I like you.
I like you too. Keep being you.
I’d first ask you to define happiness.
Temporary pleasures will always be fleeting, unreliable, and fraught with danger. Drugs and alcohol feel great in the moment, for example. So does eating junk food and watching TV. But we all know the problems with these things.
Is happiness the pleasure brought by fulfilling hobbies? That’s probably a little more productive, but also will never be continuous. And often, if you try to make that your entire life, it loses its joy. The recreation is often the joyful part.
Personally for me, my interactions with patients and being able to use my intellect to help people medically is so deeply satisfying that I’m motivated to go to work despite there being so many things to hate about my job. So that’s an interesting wrinkle on the idea of happiness.
I’m not really trying to get at an answer here. We just had a whole meditation retreat at my church about this exact topic: What is the purpose of life? But maybe some ideas to help you clarify your own thoughts about the subject.
The church I was raised in also makes a distinction between real happiness and temporary pleasure. I reject that idea. You’re right that drugs and alcohol can have negative side-effects or long-term effects. TV doesn’t, it’s just wasted time. But that makes me think that you’re saying: no, happiness isn’t the point, being productive is more important.
Are you willing to share: what’s your purpose?
Oh definitely and 1000% would never say that productivity is the purpose of life. That perspective is so disgusting, in my opinion. The interactions I have with my patients that bring such satisfaction are the exact opposite of “productive” and frequently put me at odds with the goals of the corporation I have no choice but to work for.
Probably, for me, I’d say my purpose is to lift up people around me. To help them find the ways they are strong and support them through the ways they are weak. Sometimes the only thing I can really do to help someone in the moment is make them laugh, so I try to do that. Sometimes I just sit with them while they cry. Being a nurse just happens to be a profession where I can do this and also receive a paycheck, so it works for me.
I like to picture the world as a scale of good things and bad things. I can’t fix all the bad things, but I can add weight to the side of the good things every day. Put one more thing on the good side of the scale and tilt the world in that direction however minutely. I won’t tip the whole scale by myself, but my efforts combined with all the other people in the world doing good things that I don’t even know about certainly will, even if I personally don’t get to witness that tilting.
And that last paragraph is pretty key, in my opinion. Imagination is a fundamental ability of human beings and what we believe about ourselves and the world affects us more than anything external to ourselves. And the way we imagine ourselves and the world is always inherently within our control. So I think part of “what we do” in life is to create meaning.
Everyone has to figure out their own purpose
For me, the purpose is to experience life. The good, the bad, everything.
As an aside, happiness is a carrot / stick game. Evolution has ensured that its unobtainable for any length of time.
You’re better off seeking contentment.
The purpose of each person’s life is for them to define.
It’s not something that is assigned to you, and it doesn’t have to be the same as anyone else’s purpose.
And it can change over time as your experiences and circumstances mold the person you are.
There is no purpose in life. Like others have said, the fact that we’re all here and life exists at all is entirely an incredible accident. As that’s the case, how could we have any inherent purpose?
The endless pursuit of a purpose can actually make you more unhappy.
