The answer to the meaning of life!
Humans have been searching for the meaning of life since eternity. We feel that it is very important to find and some might even say that without knowing their purpose we are just living zombies, living day to day without going anywhere.
Let us delve into this answer using two perspectives, biological and spiritual (i.e. consciousness) .
Biologically, our purpose is survival and reproduction, i.e. food and sex. We all know this instinctively and we highly value our lives and that of our children, and many times as proven historically in famines, epidemics and wars, we are willing to sacrifice others’ lives to keep our and our children’s life. So, there is no debate on the purpose of our life if we consider it from the viewpoint of biology, and if you ask why is it that all organisms on earth have the same biological purpose (survival and reproduction), the answer is of course because any organism that may have evolved with a different biological purpose would all have gone extinct because nature believes in survival of the fittest. You could take the example of the dodo bird that actually tried to get friendly with colonizers or imagine if the purpose of a bear’s life was to party and have fun, we could very well predict the extinction of the bears if that were so. Thus, we conclude that the purpose of life, biologically speaking, is survival and reproduction.
However, what happens when survival is virtually guaranteed and reproduction is also virtually guaranteed, if a human didn’t have to go hunting everyday or fight wars every decade, or fight the neighbor to death because they stole your cattle, and at the appropriate age they would get to meet many humans of the opposite sex to try relationships, instead of having to fight for one. Take the findings of this research for example, “Across the entire historical sample the authors found that on average, 26.9% of newborns died in their first year of life and 46.2% died before they reached adulthood. Two estimates that are easy to remember: Around a quarter died in the first year of life. Around half died as children.” And compare that to today where the mortality rate of children under 15 was 6.2 million in 2018, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). This goes to show that humans by and large do not have worries of survival or reproduction (except if your genitalia is defunct). This has led us to a conundrum, in ancient times people were so busy everyday to feed themselves that they didn’t have the luxury to contemplate the question “Why are we still here? Just to suffer?”. Well now we have enough food and lifespan to come to the greatest questions in human history, “Do aliens exists?”, “Is the earth flat?”, “Does she like me?”, and “What is the meaning of life?”
The answers is as numerous as there are stars in the universe, perhaps more, because every human being has lived a different life and experienced different things, thinks differently and subjectively experiences a world completely unique to every other human. Every person will find different meanings of life at different junctures of their life from childhood to old age and it is arbitrary and usually coincides with what makes them happy (a person’s meaning of life will never be to experience pain or depression except masochists and nihilists).
To those of you who are religious you likely adapted your purpose in life based on religious teachings, whatever it may be.
However to those who are currently in an existential crisis or are muddled, and wish to find the answer to the meaning of life, it is best to know that you don’t need to have the complete answer or the best answer to the meaning of life to live life and find success, you just need to have a reasonable one, based on both rationality and emotion, one that you are satisfied with, and as you go through life, you can and should improve it or change it to suit that particular junction of your life. For a person who has depression doctors usually suggest trying to make friends for a start and as time goes by make hobbies, start going to work, interact with others, and so on. The same way when finding a purpose of life, you could just start with a small purpose like “I want not to be fat”, and keep adding things as time goes on like “I want to win the world body-building championship”, and maybe when you’re old you’ll add “I feel that my purpose is to promote health among people”.
I wish good fortune to all those who are searching for their meaning of life.
Endnotes:
- Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie and Bernadeta Dadonaite (2013) — “Child and Infant Mortality”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality' [Online Resource]
- https://www.who.int/news/item/19-09-2019-more-women-and-children-survive-today-than-ever-before-un-report
- If you’re curious of my meaning of life, currently it is to write and try to provide a different perspective to people and hope I made a positive impact on their lives no matter how infinitesimal.
