Essay 7 - The Purpose of Your Life

In reflective moments, a person might wonder what is the point of their life; or what their purpose might be; or why they are here to begin with. These questions are as slippery as the question regarding what their life means, and they are slippery for the same reason. As I said in the Introduction, many questions are difficult because they include ambiguous words. Purpose, like meaning, can be understood as several different, possibly conflicting, things which makes any integration of the ideas elusive, confusing, and frustrating.

For example, one’s purpose from a Darwinian perspective is to reproduce, or, more specifically, to pass your DNA on to future generations. If members of the human species did not reproduce there would not be any more human species.

From the perspective of a community, your purpose is to be a good citizen of the community, which may conflict with your Darwinian purpose, or it may not. You also have various purposes based on roles you play such as being a parent or a professional of some kind. But each of these is a specific secondary purpose, such as your purpose as a parent or your purpose as a citizen. These purposes are not the purpose of your life.

Your life is a collection of subjective emotional experiences. Some of those may result from the pursuit of other purposes but none of those secondary purposes constitute your life. They are only parts of it. Since your life consists of the aggregate of those experiences, the purpose of your life is to make sense out of those experiences.

This is not to say all these other purposes don’t matter. They do, as they all contribute to your life, or more specifically to your subjective emotional experiences. Or, to tie it into what we have been talking about, we can say that your purpose in life is to find your meaning.

You can die rich or famous and still not be satisfied. In fact, you can pursue any of life’s secondary purposes and still not be satisfied at the end. But if you find enduring meaning in your life, if you manage to make sense out of your experiences, you will come to the end satisfied. So that is your purpose. But how does one find meaning? The quick answer is that you do not find it, you create it. But how does that work? Keep reading.

This essay is 410 words long and the audio is about 3 1/2 minutes long.