There Is No Life Purpose

Quarter-life Crisis hits people around the age of 25. Usually, this is the time where people finish university and enter the workforce. Working 5 days a week, the uniform work life seems way different from what one can expect while he was in university. We start to question what is meaning of our existence and work.

What is my life purpose?

This is the most fundamental question in a Quarter-life Crisis. One ponders over the meaning of life. If I am going to die anyway, and in a few hundred years I’ll be forgotten, what is the point of living?

Some people distract themselves with material, external goals like money and fame. Some people fall into a vicious cycle and spend years to get back out of it.

There are two main problems with this question:

• It assumes that one must have a life purposes to be uncovered, not to be made
• It implies that the purpose has to be a static that won’t change

Our Existence Is A Mirage

How do we define the form of our existence? What am I?

Some people on the Internet say:

You are a ghost, driving a meat covered skeleton made from stardust, riding a rock floating through space.

There are several (pretty extreme) ways to describe our existence:

• Everything covered by my skin
• The nervous system and my brain together
• The thoughts I have (running inside my brain)
• The eletrical signals with which my thoughts are made up of

In other words, “I” am just made of very complex, interconnected system, bounded by the physical laws. Humans aren’t special. It just happens that the complex system enables us to have a self-consciousness, to be aware of what is happening within our mind.

So like a stone on the roadside, or a tree in a forest, it just exists there. Nothing more is attached to it.

But this very nihilistic point of view on our existence does not prevent us from having a life purpose. It just needs some paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing Life Purpose

The word “life purpose” contains too much inside. Instead of asking “what is my life purpose”, I’ll ask:

Given my finite time of being in this world, how would I want to spend all these time?

Likely there is a more plain and precise version of it, but it takes out many unnecesary meanings accompanied by the word “life purpose”.

Now, with this “better” version of the question, the answer should be straight-forward. My answer is:

To enjoy every moment of my time on earth

I know this answer is a cliche, so I will illustrate it with some examples.

• Work towards more efficient ways to work. Work is unavoidable. Only through work we have all the daily necessities and comfort. However, there are many ways to make work more efficient.
• Understand how the world works. Only through knowing how it works now, I can know ways to work more efficiently.
• Build meaningful relationship. We can’t do it alone. And interacting with people is where a meaning is from.

Everything WILL Change, Including “Life Purpose”

I never had and I don’t have a “dream job”. I still can’t say for sure what I want to do all my life. In the past few years, many things have changed around me. I myself changed a lot as well. I picked up new habits & ditched old habits, met new people and missed some old friends.

The world is changing. One is aging. No one can stay the same forever. There must be changes.

For example, right now I want to make work, an activity that we spend like half of our life on, a more pleasant experience. I know I probably have to do it for (at least) 40 more years. And I want it to be enjoyable. Maybe one day, or when I get older, my “life purpose” changes. That’s normal. We are all evolving everyday, according to the environment we are in.