64. Needing Purpose

What is life for? Is it for having new experiences and finding happiness? Is it for learning about the world and ourselves? Is it for achieving material success and building a family? Is it for supporting others and making the world better for future generations? Is it for expressing ourselves and creating beautiful art? Perhaps life is for all of these things and more.

If we have an answer to the question of life’s purpose then the question dissolves without a fight. But what if all answers fail to satisfy? What if others question our answer and tell us it’s wrong? What if we can’t convincingly defend our answer?

Without conviction in our answer, the question of life’s purpose can haunt us. We can become obsessed with it and with trying to justify our lives. This obsession is a symptom of attachment to the belief that only what is meaningful is worthwhile. We feel our daily activities lack ultimate meaning and, seeing this, we are consumed by the worry that our lives are not worth living.

Our worrying traps us because we feel each possible answer to our demand for meaning is not good enough, not convincing enough, or not justified enough. We want an answer that comes with a final justification. We want an answer we can feel certain about. The trap is that certainty of this kind is simply not feasible.

We cannot reach anything ultimate, and any foundations we might furnish must rest on nothing more than ourselves. This is true not just for existential questions but for all of our knowledge. So a question like “what is life for?” can only be answered with something we choose for ourselves. If we are not satisfied by any of the answers we can imagine then the best we can do is to try to let go of the question.

What we really want anyway is not to know our purpose in flimsy words but to feel our concrete actions are purposeful ones. And this is something we can achieve. If we are open to the world and pay attention to ourselves and the people around us, then we will see need and what we must to do to meet it. And in meeting the needs of ourselves and others, our actions will feel more purposeful than ever before.