What is the meaning of life? What is your purpose? Why are you here? Are you here for a reason? Is there a divine entity looking down on you? What happens after you die?
The way you answer these questions determines the overall context for everything you do in life. It is not often that people sit down and seriously consider these questions but I’m here to tell you that it’s worth putting in the time and effort to figure it out, and I will tell you how I have gone about it.
This is part five of a seven-part series on how to find purpose and direction in your life:
Part 1: Why It’s Worth Knowing
Part 2: Overview
Part 3: Know Yourself
Part 4: Build Strong Foundations
Part 5: How Should We Live?
Part 6: Why Purpose Doesn’t Interest You yet (and When It Will)
Part 7: Discovery
How Should We Live?
In this post, we take a step back and look at the wider world instead of just analysing ourselves. Note: some content has originated from Steve Pavlina’s blog post on the same topic.
A Predefined Purpose
Do you believe that you were born with purpose? That you’re here for a reason? If so, what power imbued you with this purpose? If you believe you were born for a reason and that reason was bestowed upon you by a God, please see the post on building strong foundations where I spoke of the importance of only believing things with strong reasoning and evidence to back it up (the strength of the reasoning and evidence in proportion with how significant the belief’s impact is on your life). Since a supernatural being or power does not manifest itself in any way in our objective reality, we cannot assume any life was given a predefined purpose by one.
Thor’s Battle Against the Jötnar (1872) by Mårten Eskil Winge
Then why are we here? I think the lure of a belief in a higher power is that it gives meaning and explanation where there is (currently) none. Imagine many years ago when no one knew what causes thunder and lightning — this dramatic splitting of the skies that booms across the lands. The prospect of not knowing would have been scary. What if there’s someone up there smashing hammers or throwing lightning bolts when they’re angry? What if their wrath is turned on me and my life is at risk? The lure of explaining it away to a God like Zeus or Thor, with a personality that they can placate with offerings and sacrifice, is understandable. But there was never a person in the clouds or a hammer being thrown around — nothing that warranted a belief in a God.
To many, at least at first, it might be a scary prospect to be born without a predefined purpose. Is our existence just random, then? Is life meaningless? As for the randomness — yes, probably. The random event of self-replicating cells evolving over thousands of years with the pressure of natural selection. This natural selection favoured organisms that strove for pleasure and avoided pain. But meaningless? Only if you want it to be. To me, life is what you make of it. Not having a predefined purpose allows me the freedom to live how I choose to live and it puts me in control of my actions.
Eudaimonia
Without a predefined purpose, how should we live? Philosophers have been trying to answer this question and ones like it for thousands of years. Aristotle (384—322 BC), in particular, came up with the answer of seeking ‘eudaimonia‘. This has been tough to translate but the two most favoured translations are ‘happiness’ and ‘human flourishing’. I translate it into ‘fulfilment’ but that’s not entirely what eudaimonia means. Where fulfilment can be sought after and attained, and you can feel fulfilled (an emotion), eudaimonia is not a state of being — it’s a way of living. It’s continuous. I like to consider it as a way of living that continuously provides fulfilment and happiness to you.
This was the foundation of my post on maximising the value of life, where I noted that you want to maximise the fulfilment, happiness, and pleasure that you experience (in addition to increasing longevity and minimising discontent, sadness, and pain). Fulfilment is the big one and it can be hard to determine what can bring it to you. This series on discovering purpose and direction will go a long way towards helping you figure out how to get more of it. In doing so, this search for purpose is no longer a search for reason, it’s a selection of the direction you want your life to take. What things you want to do, the person you want to be, the different you want to make, and the values you want to live by.
Context
What is your context? Context is like a lens that you see the world through and influences every decision you make and the direction your life takes. It’s important to note that if you don’t consider your own context then it’s likely that you have taken on the context of the society and culture you were brought up in or surrounded by.
It’s a generalisation to say that our society is somewhat materialistic and commercialised. It tells you life is about going to school, getting a good education, working in a job, raising a family, saving some money, and retiring. Subscribing to this context without thought is a mistake. Something isn’t important just because society says so. What do you think is important? What do you think life is about?
Values
The reflection work you have done in the previous few posts will have given you a good idea of who you are and what is important to you. Above, we spoke of not being born with any predefined purpose and that life is what we make of it. We also touched on Aristotles’s answer of eudaimonia — but how does this translate into a way of life?
Aristotle’s eudaimonia answer consisted two main components: virtuous action and contemplation. His contemplation involved looking at people in society who were expressing signs of living a virtuous life and looking for patterns that he could emulate. As it turned out, such people would usually behave with some degree of integrity, honour, courage, honesty, rationality, fairness, etc.
Yesterday’s post on building strong foundations involved assessing the values that were important to you. See how they fit in to a way of living. I believe the values listed above are important to a life of virtue and success, but while values are important things to live by they aren’t necessarily things we can strive for or aim towards. Values are like the pavement and road lines that keep you on track, along a safe and efficient path to where you want to go. The goals you strive for determine which road to take and in what direction.
For me, that’s where optimisation and self-improvement come in. Improving myself in one area or another adds meaning to my life, a sense of having made progress. I will always strive to be better in every way possible: more able, healthier, better at using my time, more rational, more intelligent and knowledgeable, more understanding, closer to my ideal image, living my ideal lifestyle. This self-optimising applies to the rest of the world as well: if there is something that can be improved in the world, I want to help. From the little things like helping a friend with a problem they have or improving the functionality of my family’s small business bookkeeping, to the bigger things like ending aging, or reducing poverty. Every improvement I make in the world brings with it a sense of fulfilment and meaning, a sense that I’m making a difference and that the difference is important.
As for defining what an improvement is, refer to the values of living virtuously, above, refer to your values and passions, and refer to Maslow’s hierarchy in the next post in this series.
If you want to make a difference in the world, try to make the biggest difference possible and not be content with the small actions. Never settle for less. Analyse the needs in the world and compare them to your talents, skills, and passions from the previous two posts and find a match. That’s where you can make a bigger difference.
This is part five of a seven-part series on how to find purpose and direction in your life:
Part 1: Why It’s Worth Knowing
Part 2: Overview
Part 3: Know Yourself
Part 4: Build Strong Foundations
Part 5: How Should We Live?
Part 6: Why Purpose Doesn’t Interest You yet (and When It Will)
Part 7: Discovery
