What Is the Purpose of Life?

Sorry to break your heart, life is purposeless

The lifespan of the average human is 68.9 years for men and 73.9 years for women. If you are amongst those who are lucky enough to live up to 78, at this age it is expected that you have lived your life; work and career, children and family, wisdom and experience, you’ve seen it all. And then, you die.

Now things begin to get tricky. We all have similar ideas about what life on Earth should look like. We have a quasi-agreement about what a successful life is; about the values that should matter. Conversely, we’ve been very good at disagreeing about what comes after life. Our division on this issue is irreconcilable and largely dependent on a person’s religious views. I wrote an article exploring this topic, you can access it on this link.

What were the odds of your existence?

Existing is no small feat. You had to defy odds of gigantic proportions for your existence to be possible. To put this in perspective, consider these 2 facts;

1. Of the billion planets that exist, Earth is the only known planet that can support human life. This means that the odds of life in the universe are one in many billions.

2. A single ejaculation contains about 15 million sperms per millimetre. What were the chances that despite all odds, you became the lucky sperm that could fertilize the egg? To this, you can also add all the potential events that could have taken your life while you were still a fetus in the womb.

While the conversation about the afterlife rages on, and considering the enormous odds we had to overcome to survive, one can’t help but ask; What is the purpose of life? The answer to this question has eluded theologians and philosophers over several generations. Just like the question about the afterlife, nobody seems to be sure and the answer one gives is largely dependent on their religious views.

What do people think/ say?

I want to sincerely apologize to you, my reader, for what I’m about to reveal next. I do not have the answers either. I tried searching on Google and I found so many different answers, I couldn’t even choose one because they all made sense. Here are some of the answers I found;

The purpose of life is a life of purpose — Robert Byrne

The purpose of life is to be happy — -unknown

The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away — Pablo Picasso

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable. To be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In matters that concern our existence and the reasons for it, every human has the right to have an opinion. When everybody has an opinion, then it is only normal that our opinions might be different, and some others might be in complete opposition to one another. For this reason, I’m not surprised by the heap of opinions out there, or by the fact that neither I nor anybody has the perfect answer. I’ll go on record as saying that nobody will ever have the ultimate answer to the question of the purpose of the existence of life.

Why are we here?

A couple of months ago, if you had asked me if life on earth had a purpose, I would have said yes. If you had gone ahead to ask what I think that purpose is, you would have gotten an answer like this; the purpose of life is to live happy and fulfilled and bequeath a legacy that improves the lives of future generations.

Now, my views have changed. After much deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that there is no purpose to life. Unfortunately, the big bang or God (depending on what you believe in) did not leave us an owner’s manual to explain why we are here. On the other hand, when you look at all the lives that have been before you and the ones still to come, the purposelessness of life on earth becomes evident.

We are born, we live, work, earn, reproduce, age, and then we die. This is the endless cycle of chance we are condemned to, the accident of our existence.

I know this isn’t the answer you were expecting to get. I apologize again if this revelation broke your fragile little heart. But think about it; why does any being exist on Earth? No matter what your answer is, we all die in the end and return to dust. At the moment you close your eyes in death, everything you ever knew, believed in, or worked for becomes irrelevant. All the money, beauty, wisdom, and purpose you have ceases to exist for you. You become nothing, dust! So what is the purpose of it all anyway?

So why bother living?

It’s time to make another confession. Of all the answers I found while researching this topic, none of them are wrong. Those answers are based on personal experiences and knowledge of the people who wrote them.

To be confronted by the truth that your life is purposeless can be a disorienting experience. It questions everything you’ve ever known or done on Earth. It questions your very existence. If there is no purpose to my life, does that mean I’m empty, nothing, a nonentity?

This truth, like all truths, can be uncomfortable to bear. So we come up with a brilliant idea; we give our lives a purpose. We literally invent a purpose from thin air and somehow attach that to the reason why we are on this earth. To be happy? To be successful? To be kind? To be useful? To serve humanity? To serve God? If you think any of this is your purpose in life, that’s because you made it so, you gave it to yourself.

Humans inventing a purpose for our existence helps us achieve 2 things;

1. It saves us from the horror and utter hopelessness that lies in the knowledge and acceptance of our ultimate uselessness in the cosmic drama called life.

2. It gives us a reason to live, a reason to be, a reason to do, a reason to carry on.

Conclusion

I admit that I might not have provided the most satisfying answer to an important question. This question predates me, so I do not harbour any pretensions about being the messiah who solves the mystery of the existence of life on Earth. It does seem that there is no ultimate reason for our existence. True, we have a biological and ethical duty to reproduce in order to propagate our species. But that begs the question; to what end?

If you try to wrap your head around this, fact, it could indeed be overwhelming. Instead, we can pretend like we have a reason or at least give ourselves one.

Please join me as I explore this and related topics in future posts.