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?
Consider reading “Existentialism is a Humanism”
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 only purpose to life is to live it. Beyond that, you have to find the meaning that suits you for yourself.
There is no purpose to life. It’s all arbitrary. Life is whatever you make it to be.
Unless you’re physically incapable just about everything in life is a choice, including happiness and the pursuit of it.
Our biggest hurdle is our own mind.
The purpose of life is to not die.
Technically the truth.
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?
The purpose of human life is to submit ourselves to the Idea.
no the purpose of life is to exist
I think it kind of depends on how you define ‘happy’. I do believe that if life has any point, it is to be happy. It’s definitely harder than it sounds, and the path is usually long and differs from person to person.
I have spent a long time doing things I thought would make me happy. Often they did, in the short term, but not in the long term. Sometimes what makes me happy changes!
You can also intentionally change what makes you happy. Try new things, develop new habits. Maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s feeding hungry people or political organizing. Maybe it’s a hobby group.
It’s your life, do what you want with it.
I personally think the purpose of life is to reproduce. Everything we are is just because it made us better at surviving and multiplying. We are merely animals.
I dont think we need to have kids just because that’s what we exist for. We’re intelligent enough to go against our basic instincts if we wish. In that optic, we all need to find our own purpose!
To say the purpose of life is to reproduce is like saying the purpose of a raindrop is to keep falling down. We should not confuse purpose with cause! Natural selection for self-replication is how we ended up here, but, as you said, we have free will to choose where we go next.
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.
( :
Tldr: Idk didn’t read it
It’s not worth it. Just smile politely at the rambling person and move on to the next comment.
Lmao true
A very philosophical question, so I’m going to ramble a bit:
I think there cannot be an objective purpose to anything, because any purpose can only go so far. E g. if the purpose of life is to be happy, then what is the purpose of being happy? And what is the purpose of that purpose, and so on? It never ends, there will never be a final answer giving everything before it objective purpose, because that is not how purpose works.
Purpose is a human concept, designed to structure our lives and to help us come up with sub-tasks for bigger goals. And it only really works if we fill in the final goal by saying “because I want that, for whatever reason”. For many someone else fills in that goal and we just follow it, maybe feeling a little empty inside.
So I think the real question is, how do you find that final answer, and the only thing I can think of is: Whatever feels right to you. And right doesn’t have to be happy, right means true to yourself imo. If you had a nice day then it might mean happy, but if you had a shitty day then it might mean seeking comfort or some distraction.
The one thing that can make this very difficult is having expectations about what you should be or feel, and those expectations not matching up with your subjective reality. We all have them, from our upbringing, our peers and experiences, and they can often be very subtle and subconscious. But they are only useful if they help you find your true self imo, otherwise they can be very misleading and painful.
I really like what you said here. Being happy is fine and it’s enough a lot of the time. There can be other ways to find meaning in life, and those will always be subjective and personal. Many people will try to tell you how you should love your life, but it will only be meaningful if it aligns with your own sense of self.
Personally, I’m allergic to the word “should”. My reaction is: “don’t impose your subjective reality on me.” But someone I respect and admire said that there would be more to life than happiness and that’s part of where my question came from. I think there can be more to life than happiness, but I’m not falling short if I’m finding happiness for myself and my family and my friends; that can be enough, because I decided it’s enough.
Thank you for your answer.
Life IS the purpose. If you’re alive, you’re already fulfilling your purpose whether you are aware of it or not.
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.
The purpose of life (imo) is to discover humanity in yourself and what “the best human” means to you. People get their ideas on “the best human” from many inspired examples. The Buddha, Mohammed the Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, Julius Caesar, or Jimmy Buffet. Some people need no such idols and can form their own understanding of what it means to be human, but all of these scale.
Your humanity plays into the identity of your family, plays into the identity of your city/town, plays into the identity of your region, plays into the identity of your nation, and at the top is the true meaning of life: the culmination of every dream and desire, the moral fabric of our species, and the embodiment of the only such entity in existence to our knowledge. The purpose of life is to find that, reconcile with it, and use the wisdom you gain in doing so to help shape our species into a happy, healthy, and mature civilization, or die trying.
