Purpose of Life

To pass on our genes, to make money and raise a family, to keep a bubble of order in the entropic universe, to build a sucessful company, to help those in need, to express oneself on a blank canvas with bristles attached to wood, to worship God, to worship the all-mighty all-powerful Pewdiepie, to plant a grape vine on Mars, to fight for what you believe in against a sea of adversity — these are all sources of meaning and fulfillment. Some may sound more fun or more relevant than others, but it is almost impossible to argue that my life goal is more meaningful than yours. So let's try and do just that.

The purpose of the life of this blog post is not to explicity rank life goals or tell you that what you're doing wrong, but to find a way to quantify purposes to help us identify goals that best suit us. In the list above, some purposes will probably seem better to you than others. For me, chasing money and sex seems superficial and temporary when compared to helping those in need or creating everlasting knowledge and art. I'm going to jot down my thoguhts on what I think are the "better" forms of life goals and how to identify them. [1]

So what constitutes a "good" purpose? Possible answer: fulfillment. Another possible answer: lasting happiness and peace knowing that you contributed to the world in a meaningful way, aka fulfillment. Another good but controversial answer: ignoring others and pursuing your own self-discovery and passions, also known as fulfillment (yes I'm doing this to explain what I mean by fulfillment). The great thing about these answers is how vague they are — fulfillment can mean to one person the opposite of what it means to another, yet both people can live fully and meaningfully. Every flavor of fulfillment shares the same sweet sense of satisfaction and the salty taste of sweat and tears spent in the pursuit of a worthy goal.

Even though fulfillment is inherently subjective, there are common properties in methods used to attain fulfillment, namely hard work and meaningful improvement. My father has told me time and time again to work hard, and after decades of responding with a halfhearted "ok," I've come back to appreciate his words. Working hard on a task and seeing it come to fruition is satisfying to say the least.

However, if I work hard counting the blades of grass in my neighborhood, this does not strike me as fulfilling. Therefore I include a prerequisite of meaningful improvement for a goal to be considered a good candidate for fulfillment. Improving in an area in the absence of hard work usually happens as a surprise and is not fulfilling, for example winning the lottery or cheating in games. Meaningful improvement does not only include improving oneself, but also improving others and working towards our own goals if they are highly intrinsically motivated (e.g. painting but not making money).

Now that we've defined fulfillment and its identifying factors, how can we use this knowledge in our own pursuits for meaningful lives?

Studying what fulfillment is and where it grows empowers us to identify meaningful goals and helps us realize when we might be chasing pipe dreams. An example of the latter case can be seen in many college students' lives. If our friends are chasing pretigious jobs and green paper and we don't stop to figure out our own personal goals, it's easy to get swept up in also valuing those things. If we find ourselves in this position and ask ourselves if we need to work hard and will improve from these goals, the answer will be yes, so chasing these things will most likely provide fulfillment. But the problem comes if we keep chasing a better career and money. The fifth promotion is probably less significant and helpful than getting the initial job, and same with green paper. Therefore the fulfillment criteria are not fulfilled, implying that those goals are not worth long term pursuit.

A reason that we might still be pressured to chase those goals is social approval, which in the end might not require hard work and may also be detrimental to our own self-improvement, so that is also not worth pursuing without other reasons. If we ask ourselves how we can meaningfully improve in this position, some goals could be improving our skills by building new products and companies or improving our community by helping and developing relationships with others.

We now have the tools to determine whether goals are fulfillment-enabling or they exist for some other purpose. It would be nice to be able to actively develop fulfilling goals rather than be reactive. After years of introspection, it seems to me that most forms of fulfillment fall into 3 areas. This categorizing of fulfillment helps me plan and think more clearly about my own goals, and I've also identified a triangle where the lack of any of these areas can result in a less fulfilled life, so without further ado: The Stool of Life.

The first area has to do with the Self, where one should aim to love, understand, and control oneself. Investing time into improving yourself and maintaining your health is almost always worth it — whenever I work out or read or meditate, it often takes much effort to start each act, but they always make me feel empowered and excited about the world and about myself. There are actually 3 subareas of the Self that include the physical, mental, and spiritual parts. Physical health involves exercise and taking care of our various limbs and organs, as a problem with any of them will likely lead to an impaired live. Mental health involves being aware of and managing our emotions and cognition. And spiritual health involves having purpose and control over our perception of life. Keeping ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually strong not only is a source of fulfillment, but powers all other areas of our lives, resulting in a metafulfillment that compounds to other parts of our lives.

The second area of fulfillment is Relationships, where there is mutual love and respect with those closest to you. Time and time again, respected and wise individuals say that their loved ones are the most important parts of their lives. There are also 3 subareas of Relationships: friends, family, and significant others, each playing their own role in our lives. Friends are an outlet to explore life with, family is a consistent source of happiness and love, and significant others open a new dimension in which to experience life in. Having healthy relationships with these people provides such great fulfillment and happiness. It's difficult sharing your thoughts and laying out your self for others to see who you really are, but feeling a connection with another human being is truly an amazing, fulfilling experience.

The last area of fulfillment is Work, where you aim to accomplish something greater than yourself. The 3 trends of having fulfilling Work is that it helps others, is challenging, and leads to increased efficacy whether it be in the form of money, connections, etc. Examples include building companies, volunteering, writing books, or any other form of venturing out of yourself and immediate community. It feels like most of society's advice is focused on this area, which makes sense considering how difficult it is to write a book or build a company and how beneficial they are for society, so this area is a clear contender for fulfillment.

Something interesting is that the order in which society presents advice and importance to these three areas is in the opposite order that I presented them. The most societal emphasis is placed on achieving in the workplace while people are wary of talking about how to love oneself, possibly for fear of being seen as weak. The reason I think that the Self is the most important area is because if we are successful in Relationships and Work but not Self, we'll have all this outwards success and attention but we won't have a way to deal with the inner turmoil that plagues each person. If we take away the Relationship aspect but include the Self and Work, then we'll be focused on improving ourselves and our career, but won't feel like we have any close friends or intimate connections. For the last scenario where we have the Self and Relationship areas covered, we'll be happy about ourselves and about our immediate community, but we might feel left out in terms of a higher goal and societal measures of success like money and fame. To me, this last area seems like the best of these scenarios, which is why I think that Work is less important than Self and Relationships.

Whenever I feel lost in life, I start thinking about the purpose of it all, and I always come back to these three areas. The Stool of Life helps me sit down and identify the things I want to work towards and pushes me back on track to continue exploring the wonderful furniture that life has to offer.

Footnotes

1: Disclaimer: these are the thoughts of a random college student so please do not take these thoughts too seriously. I am just starting to build my life philosophy, and my main goal in writing this is to help me organize my thoughts as well as receive feedback. If you have any feedback or thoughts, I would LOVE to hear them — please email me! :) ↩