When I’m unhappy, I feel like I’m doing life wrong. I’d rather be happy. But is happiness the point of life, or is there more to it? If I pursue happiness, mine first then for those around me, is that selfish? But if there’s a bigger purpose, then what about people with Alzheimer’s or dementia who can’t recall recent experiences or make plans?
The only objective purpose in life is to spread your genes. You share that same purpose with every other living thing.
Other than that, it’s up to you. My purpose in life is to keep my girlfriend happy and destroy as many jobs as I can. My career in industrial automation is the key to both.
Not even that. It’s not like you’ve failed at life if you don’t have kids. You just haven’t spread your genetic information. Saying that its your purpose to spread them implies it’s the genes purpose to be spread. Genes simply are, they don’t have a purpose just like you don’t; evolution has just given organisms behaviors and mechanisms that make it very likely that they will be regardless of that lack of purpose.
That’s a valid way of looking at it, too.
Realistically, the concept of “purpose” doesn’t exist in the universe outside of our imagination any more than justice, beauty, or morality. Things just are what they are and follow the laws of physics.
If we’re making it all up as we go along, there aren’t any wrong answers. I claim the purpose of living things is to reproduce, but it’s true that living things reproduce because that’s what living things do (otherwise we’d have run out of them by now). Kind of a chicken/egg thing there.
That’s not my purpose; it’s my genes’ purpose.
(Similarly, any one of my somatic cells could “decide” to “pursue the goal” of spreading its own genes instead of cooperating with the other tissues and organs around it. We call that “cancer”.)
Just my luck, the only objective purpose in life doesn’t work as a gay guy. I’m going to try the destroying jobs thing instead.
You can still pass on your memes!
If society is an organism, you’re a somatic cell rather than a germ cell. You’re an important part of multicellular life!
It’s fun! And it pays well. Get your engineering or comp sci degree and give me a call.