MY LIFE, MY PURPOSE

Like any other human being at leisure or otherwise, I often wonder why am I born, what is the purpose of my life and so on. One day, it struck me that my answer will be different from almost every other creature I share the Earth with. Actually, there is not just one world. Each of our minds contains a very different world from the rest. And we think that the world contained within our small mind is actually the world, whereas it is just one out of the so many other versions. Considering just the human beings, we are more than 7 billion of us here on this Earth. Also, there are so so many species with so so many members. So, there are as many worlds as well.

For instance, my cat’s world is how to gather her daily food and how to keep her children alive. A circus lion’s world revolves around the fear of its master and the claps from so many people surrounding it. To think of it, our world is safely locked inside our mind and is composed of the people or events that we mostly associate ourselves with. That is just fair, but considering our own world as the whole world is just not fine. Had I been born in the 18th century, my world, i.e. my daily life would have nothing in common than the case of me being born in the 22nd century. It would also be drastically different in the cases of my birth in Siberia or South America. It’s just a matter of space and time and our thoughts and situation and so on.

Coming to life, I frankly believe life is an accident. Well, not exactly. But the first organism was just a coincidence of the right materials and the right conditions. So, it was a specialized matter with special properties. Long story short, species evolved, becoming more and more conscious and more and more capable of deriving advantages from the environment and other species. And then, slow claps, enters the Homo sapien. Twenty-four hours a day was used up for finding food and protecting oneself. Soon, science and technology developed and we had tools and machines and gadgets and sometimes other species doing almost everything for us and we started having free time.

Soon, the concept of work and division of labour was formed. Starting from barter, goods in exchange of goods and services in exchange of services, the concept of money as a medium of exchange came into existence. Thus, the concept of job and career was launched. Life became kind of a predictable schedule: get educated, find a job, make a career, have a family, own some assets and then die. So, basically we began to believe that we are meant to do so and so in life, so and so is right or wrong. Then, we began to find the purpose of life, many theories and many philosophies. I would like to add of the plethora of the existing assumptions about the purpose of life. The views expressed below are just my reflections.

I believe that life has no purpose. Evolutionarily, the only purpose of life is to spend the time between life and death without any mishappenings or loss. Just because we have a lot of leisure and a somewhat powerful mind, we are thinking of a purpose. From a slightly different angle, the nature is constantly trying to make us evolve, to be happy, which in fact is nothing but the absence of bad incidents and bad influences. So, we can say the sole purpose of life, evolutionarily and naturally, is to spend our lifetime just being happy and doing whatever makes us happy, nothing more and nothing less.

I always feel that this world and this life are gifts from nature, from evolution. It is our chance to see and experience the world, limited by time and space. We are made to be happy and see the world around us. Everything else is just an illusion of mind, a manifestation of our narcissism which believes us to be the the most evolved and the most powerful species.