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?
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. 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”.)
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.
Just my luck, the only objective purpose in life doesn’t work as a gay guy. I’m going to try the destroying jobs thing instead.
If society is an organism, you’re a somatic cell rather than a germ cell. You’re an important part of multicellular life!
The purpose of life, is understanding.
Elemental bits of unconscious soul-awareness want to have their own experiencings, so they get caught in conceptions/lives, and have, at first, unconscious experiencings ( like a mass-of-bacteria or something ), and eventually that particular soul/atman evolves until it accidentally coincides with a human-category-life, and then, suddenly, it has self-determination/free-will/significant-karma, so now it becomes a pinball in the Universe-game…
Being fired around by the meanings it emitted into Universe, it tries applying unconsciousness-answers, and they just make things worse…
Eventually, it has reabsorbed sooo many meanings, that it becomes understanding/wise, and it realizes that this birth/striving/sickness/death cycle seems deranged, and desiring this endless cyclical-process is deranged, so it begins earning the yogas of mind, meaning, will, intent, etc, and then earns its ability to lift itself from the whole-process, up into aware-nonengaging, which is called “Blissful Clear Light” awareness, and it can simply dissolve into OceanOfAllAwakeSouls, seeing an endless-stream of Universes go by, every one crammed with unconscious & semi-conscious souls/atmans, who haven’t yet earned their dissolving-into-the-ocean-of-AWARENESS that religious-types call “God”, and … all souls Realize.
Endless stream of countless souls, each getting its own cycle-of-lives, reaping what it sowed, no matter how many “lives” ago the sowing-of-that-meaning was…
the processing is perfectly efficient.
The Christian bible’s “Jacob’s Ladder” was a depiction of souls climbing “down” into matter & “up” from unconsciousness…
The Christian bible’s “Prodigal Son” parable was about an individual soul/atman doing its down/up process: when it got fed-up with the false-answers, it turned within ( remember the root-guru of Christianity told them “The Kingdom of God is Within”, telling them to be meditating ), and “climbing the inner-mountain”, to use a buddhist phrase…
The Abrahamic religions use baptism to symbolize a soul immersing itself in unconsciousness & matter, then coming up/out of its unconsciousness…
The thing is, souls who haven’t experienced anything, want to experience their meanings, and have their understandings, but they can’t believe that “suffering” or “harm” etc are “real”, so they dive-in, and try holding to symbols, which, of course, doesn’t work…
Again, the Christian bible has an excellent symbol representing the truth:
in Revelations, John is given the Book Of Truth to eat, and he eats it, and it is syrupy-sweet in his face, but bitter in his belly, exactly as Truth itself is:
Symbolic-“truth” is naive/sweet, but real Truth is bitter, hard-earned, good aversion-therapy.
So, what to do, then?
Face into karma, face into one’s evolution, as human-category-lives are extraordinarily-rare in Universe, so make maximal use of what glorious opportunity you’ve got.
Mom brought me up Catholic, but I experienced some memories that didn’t even fit human-category-life, and, years-later, discovered they were soul-memories of other kinds of lives, which blew-up all the Abrahamic-religions, for me.
Want to get a hornet/wasp/bee out of your home?
Their sentience loves swimming ( it feels like swimming: sentience feels wet, in that kind of life ) into luminance & openness, so, simply darken/block all the ways you don’t want 'em going, and light up where you do want them going, and make certain that no scent is overriding their free-will, and they should leave your home.
That method doesn’t work with other families of insects, btw, so the experience-induced-understanding I gained from that soul-memory doesn’t work for representing any other kind of 'em.
Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni was right about fish being really mentally-limited: if you want your soul’s next life to be something other than human, go for the hive-insects, as they have awesome amounts of awareness for such teensy brains.
We only exist as temporary “clothes” that the souls underlying our lives are “wearing”.
Learning/understanding is the whole point of everything.
The desire-for-experiencing of souls is what drives evolution: when that energy expires, the population/culture/civilization/species collapses.
It’s simple, and “our kind” isn’t the center of the Universe, as the various Abrahamic religions all insist we are ( in spite of evidence ).
shrug
Facing into karma, gently but relentlessly pushing oneself to evolve, to see just how competent/complete one can become, to experience as much meaning as one can, within one’s meagre years, you know?
Evolution, internalized.
Among our kind there are 3 dimensions/layers/substances of mind:
- SurfaceMind, which dissipates every few hours
- underlying-LifeMind, which begins forming at conception, and shatters in death
- underlying-the-LifeMind Soul/CellOfGod/Atman/ChildOfGod/Rigpa, that ALL lives have driving them, until they die, when it detaches/goes-its-own-way…
Huston Smith’s brilliant & profound book “World Religions” gave much of this, in its Hindu & Buddhist chapters, btw, in case you want some source who is established.
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It’s not worth it. Just smile politely at the rambling person and move on to the next comment.
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.
There is no objective purpose to life. Some funny long molecules mashed into eachother a few billion years ago. Scientifically there is no evidence of cosmic purpose to anything.
It’s your life. You get to decide what to do with it.
There are some goals which are generally considered to be nobel. Make the world a better place, for example… but that’s a far cry from an absolute definition of purpose.
I’d refrain from thinking about a purpose and instead think of your values. Then, if you want, establish goals that align with your values.
Being happy could be a goal for you , but that’s not the same as a purpose.
