The Meaning of Life in Five Minutes

Without a purpose, a direction, you have no razor to determine what is good and what is bad. Well, other than biology and experience. But we can do better than those twin lotteries.

To frame our own purpose it’s useful to consider collective purpose. This is usually referred to as “the meaning of life” – the unanswerable question. Insert eye roll here.

It’s a bad question and when you ask bad questions you get bad answers. Why? Consider another bad question: why is the sky red? We can’t answer that question because its presumptively wrong. The sky is blue (well technically it can be red sometimes but don’t miss the point!). Asking “what is the meaning of life” implies a creator because it implies intent. It implies meaning but that’s presumptive.

Does the universe need intent to exist? Why should it?

It is a futile exercise to speculate about an external motive force that may or may not exist. C’mon, “meaning” is a compression method of brains – why are we projecting this onto the universe?

So, let’s reframe and ask practical questions. Here’s one I’d offer as replacement; what meaning should I assign life? My own life? These are useful questions. They don’t assume meaning where there is none. They assume agency which gives us freedom. The perspective of curiosity to explore, to pick up different ideals and inspect tradeoffs.

What they imply is that purpose is arbitrary. You can prove it now, just decide to dedicate your life to booger flicking, paper clip making, and so on. As long as you believe it, as long as you pursue it, it is a valid purpose. Purpose is just an infinite direction, a way to bind actions together over time isn’t it?

The Prime Directive

That said, there is a baseline purpose we can infer from observation of life. A few simple observations:

1. Life does one thing above all others; it faithfully reproduces itself indefinitely.
2. An individual can have no purpose if it’s dead.
3. Individual purpose is irrelevant if there is nothing to absorb it’s impact.

Let’s say you had an arbitrary purpose to “save” the whales. If that was your goal, surely, surely, you’d turn to space flight and capture the whales genetic information or make them into space whales. Why? Because 7 billion years from now earth will be destroyed and the whales will die.

This is the fallacy of conservationists by the way – short term thinking. Without space expansion there will be no life, no forests, no mountains, no parks – nothing but a melted ball of rock. Long before that happens it will be wiped clean multiple times by world shaking disasters. The earth is default dead.

Sure, it’s far off, but recognize the where things are going at the limit and frame your roadmap accordingly – see Taking the Limit.

I can’t tell you how to arbitrate selecting your own purpose because, well, it’s arbitrary! Both freeing and terrifying. My advice is to consider multiple answers. If you are like most though, it will be baked into your DNA to be part of something larger. To be in this together. To expand and to grow. That is what life does.

My Purpose

As for me, I won’t fight the nature of life. I’ll yoke myself to the longevity of the collective beyond the furthest hurdles I can see. Right now that’s heat death but it depends on our understanding of the universe and I’m sure our theories will oscillate wildly.

Regardless, I view life as ever curious, ever exploring, and ever progressing. I think it is humanities duty, as the only part of the universe that can look back on itself, to outlive the universe. What that means exactly is so theoretical I don’t think it’s useful. Suffice to say life is an infinite game, but it seems the conditions for life, exist on a finite time scale.

There are many who think humanity is bad, a cancer, and we should go back to “nature” and live in “harmony”. Many TV shows or books like to compare mankind have nature fighting back. A global immune system. An idea so unbelievably absurd it always makes me laugh. Those who proclaim “natural” as better are confused. There is nothing magic about “nature” anymore than a billion billion billion dice rolls are special.

We are of the earth, as long as we survive there is hope for all life. To huddle on this dying spaceship in our loin clothes is juvenile. All efforts should be bent to our acceleration because we are at risk, disaster could strike at any moment and obliterate our callow civilization and with it the hope for all of “nature”.

So, my purpose is to do everything I can to ensure humanity and it’s progeny’s survival and flourishing. That’s vague so let’s make it a bit more clear. At the largest time scale there is heat death and when you put it together with the fact the sun will destroy the solar system 7 billion years from now it’s obvious we have to become a universe spanning civilization. That is where this all leads. Of course, my focus is more practical but I keep this in the back of my mind.

What purpose will you choose for yourself?