Posted Saturday, 30 July 2011
My answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Answers, actually; looking at our existence and purpose from different perspectives.
One common answer to this dilemma is to assert that life is meaningless and without purpose. A useless answer without information or philosophical connotations. Ofcourse, it is the first step that someone needs to take to break away from the notion that life has a God-given meaning or purpose. However, we can easily provide much more meaningful answers.
From a biological perspective, it's survival of the species, right? While that applies to animals in general, it doesn't apply to humans in modern society. Survival is hardly a problem anymore- there's enough food and medicine for everyone today. We've evolved to stop killing each other, have learnt to respect each other and peacefully co-exist. We're under no immediate external threat either.
This is something that defines us as a species fundamentally. Showing kindness, love and compassion towards other human beings; respecting other members of their species. Many of modern society's problems can be boiled down to humans not respecting each other enough. In a way, we are the biggest threat to our own existence: our society still creates poorly educated, short-sighted and immature members and we have to learn to correct this.
History has many clues as well- what's common over so many years of existence? Where are we heading? Reducing the mundane day-to-day activities like food gathering to gain leisure time. Hunter-gathers turned into farmers and started forming societies when they realized the benefits: the mundane day-to-day activities are shared, creating more leisure time for everyone. Time for them to paint, play music, invent sport, invent language. This is how humans wanted to utilize their free time- to use their minds to make the world a more interesting place.
Continuing along that line of thought, we need to question the purpose of human society. In general, it structures individuals so they can enjoy and build upon each others' intellectual outputs. Essentially, it leverages the power of the collective- to learn from mistakes of other people, and build upon the successful ideas. Some things like medicine help in survival, but that's hardly ever the direct objective of exercising physical and mental capacities. Looking at it from the race's perspective, society tries to encourage and nurture new creations; an individual is but a servant working to improve conditions of existence for his race. An individual who ends up creating nothing with her free time is a failure from the society's perspective- it has failed to provide the right motivation and incentives to get her to produce something for the race.
Looking at it from the individual's perspective, life is like an amusement park. Let's take examples of different people in the park.
- Bob takes all the rides and has a ball of a time his entire life. He has fun enjoying everyone else's creations, but does not create anything.
- Leia walks into the haunted house pretty early on and it scares her so much that she refuse to try the other rides; she just stands aside and observes everyone else having fun until her life ends.
- Aaron walks into the roller coaster pretty early on, and is so impressed with it that he keeps riding the different roller coasters all his life, and asserts that all the other rides are stupid without so much as finding out what they are. He invents yet another roller coaster in his lifetime. Had he tried out the water rides, he might have invented something much more awesome- a hybrid between a water ride and a roller coaster.
All three people are failures in some way. Bob never experienced the joy of creating something, Aaron only had one kind of experience, and Leia never experienced a single thing in her entire life. So, from this perspective, the purpose of human life is to educate oneself to enjoy most (if not all) of the rides, and create something remarkable to leave behind for future generations to enjoy and build upon.