Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ Beyond Human Lacking a Defined purpose

One of the greatest forms of self-torture comes from the belief that somehow you should know what your purpose in life is.

The way I look at it is that life, for the most part, is an experiment. Look at the number of things you have to learn in order to function as a human being. You had to learn to walk, to talk, to function as a social being. They're pretty hard, and while we're wired for them, they are trial and error. Some people don't learn how to do them well ... and these are pretty basic things.

We aren't born knowing basic things. Learning what you are good at, what provides meaning for you, what you are made to do or be or whatever is a process of trial and error. It's not something you're born with, it's something you learn. I think it's possible to go through life with a brain and body geared to be a virtuoso at x and never ever find out what x is.

Look at natural selection. It's how most people learn. Randomness produces a variety of results. Some of them are well suited to an environment and replicate, others are not and die off. You are presented with a situation you can't handle, you try all kinds of things, some work, you keep them, some don't, you chuck them out.

My answer to this problem is that there is no high fallutin purpose to life. Our purposes are personal, meaningful to us. It's subjective. We both discover and create meanings in our lives through a combination of intention and chance. Don't torture yourself with a sense of necessity and failure over an idea that you should know x, y, or z. It's BS.

Sometimes the most rewarding, successful activity comes from LACK OF A DEFINITE PURPOSE on a level. For instance, in computer science genetic algorthims are highly successful at finding a variety of good solutions because, at a level, the generated solutions are completely random. In a sense, there is no purpose, no filter, affecting their generation. I think life, to a great extent, is like this. You try this, you try that, eventually you find something that works. It isn't the only thing that works, it's just something that works.

Art and play are often of great value because of their purposelessness. Take a giant (as big as a house) screwdriver. There ain't no screw that thing is good for, but it sure gives one hell of an asthetic experience.

To paraphrase Zhaung Zse, the knobby, twisted, gnarled tree is left to live while the purpose-serving, straight, perfect ones are cut down and used for wood.

Maybe you realize you're spinning your wheels because you're spinning your wheels so much in service of these ideas that are supposed to be making you happy. Could it be possible that the kinds of mental inquiries and efforts you've been going through in order to make yourself happy have been, instead, making you miserable?

Don't be so hard on yourself. Maybe the biggest success for you will be discovering that you don't have to be successful?

That's my belief about it, anyway.