Without a purpose, a direction, you have no razor to determine what is good and what is bad other than the defaults of 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 so-called unanswerable question 🙄.
The reason this question is confounding is because it's a garbage question, and when you ask garbage questions you get garbage answers.
Consider another garbage question: why is the sun the center of the solar system? We can't answer that question because its presumptively wrong. The sun isn’t the center of the solar system — the barycenter is the center.
Asking "what is the meaning of life" is also presumptive— it implies a creator because it implies intent. But does the universe need intent to exist?
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?
Instead let's reframe and ask practical questions that can take us somewhere. Consider better questions like:
- what meaning should I assign life? Why?
- what meaning should I assign my own life? Why?
These are useful questions. They assume agency and a perspective of curiosity, to pick up different ideals and inspect tradeoffs. They imply purpose is arbitrated by us. You can prove the truth of this 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 simply an infinite direction, a way to bind actions together over time to create something greater than the sum of it’s parts. The power in a purpose is not in correctness but in the having. !
The Prime Directive
I can't tell you how to arbitrate selecting your own purpose because, well, it's arbitrary
That said, there is a baseline purpose we can infer from life. A few simple observations:
- Life does one thing above all others; it faithfully reproduces itself indefinitely
- An individual can have no higher purpose if it's dead
- Individual purpose is irrelevant if there is no legacy
Let's say you are dedicated 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 X billion years from now earth will be destroyed and the whales will die.
There are many who think humanity is bad, a cancer, and we should go back to "nature" and live in "harmony". This is rubbish. 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", see Don’t Be a Turkey — The Future is Space
I see Three Ways to Contribute to Humanity at the highest level and I invite you to align with one of them. Take stock of who you are and who you could become and how that aligns.
My Purpose
I believe it is our duty, as the only part of the universe that can look back on itself, to extend life infinitely and that means domesticating space. See The “Rocketship” Era — Going Big on Startup v2 for pathing. I looked at the highest impact options from researcher to novelist, politician to technocrat and chose the path of founder-ship because I believe I need autocratic control of large sums to build he future.
What purpose will you choose for yourself?