What is the ultimate goal in life?

Great Debates
41

I think this is a very important point here. Many of us, especially those (for lack of a better term) “Type A” personalities, set up these time restricted check lists. Finish school by age 21? Check. Be at a certain point in your career at a certain age? Check. God forbid you didn’t make a milestone by the self-defined time limit, or depression and hopelessness would set in. When you do make those goals you never sit back and enjoy your accomplishment - it’s on to the next item on the list.

This was me in my twenties and I also wrestled with the meaning of life. It took a major illness to slow me down and appreciate the present. I took stock of what makes me happy and now I make those items my goal. Good food and a comfortable home. I work hard because I enjoy it. I spend more time with my family, because they are my connection to the past and the future. I try to make my S/O feel loved.

Anyway, others have expressed this much more eloquently. I wish you good fortune, Muad’Dib.

42

I went through a period of this a few years ago. I had it in my head that if I wasn’t married by the time I finished college, I was never going to find someone.

My philosophy is to make the choices that will make me happiest. Other things have to come into consideration, obviously, but those things always seem to come back to making me happy.

It’s a simple philosophy, but it works for me.

43

Because it feels good. That’s good enough for me.

44

Given the biological imperative to survive and procreate some of us species have a further imperative to connect with others of the same species (which could extend to cross species connections in some cases as between man and dog).

In fact if it weren’t for the fact that survival and procreation are endemic amongst non social species I would have no hesitation to assert that it is the very need to connect that encompasses the bilogical drives. One needs to be alive in order to connect, and having children is generally sure to provide a “guaranteed” connection.

Given the above, I would suggest that all human endeavour can be reduced to the same common denominator.

Not that it is apparent right away for babies, but they and toddlers cry when they suddenly realize that they cannot connect with Mommy .

Young children gravitate to play together in the playground. That’s when they begin to realize the role of heirarchy and the importance to maintain and improve their position to secure connection. They begin to realize that the quality and quantity of their connections are important for their happiness.

The teenage years can be quite brutal. Those who have underachieved in their ability to connect suffer. Particularly in middle school, teens of moderate connection abilities will attempt to keep the even less fortunate down while currying favour with the more successful. The importance of connection has now become fully evident.

During this time and forever after, the lack of money or the possibility of the lack of money becomes a major concern. As a young person, you can’t go out and impress your peers with attractive clothes, you can’t socialize at the night spots.etc.

The American dream requires a nice house to entertain guests, be invited to all the gatherings that your peers attend, and vacations where you connect with a lot of new people. Most of us who have experienced poverty are not thinking about starvation and being homeless. We are thinking about being stuck at home and unable to go out and interact. This need to interact/connect is so demanding that I’m sitting here typing out an essay(?) to get a couple of responses when before I was hard pressed to write an essay for school until the last possible moment!

To more directly address the propositions of the OP, I will recall my hedonistic days. I recall an urgent desire to connect with women and party party to connect. But after a while you come to realize that those connections are fleeting and unless you find yourself trapped in a group of other people trapped like yourself you will go on to establish the bases for more durable and numerous connections.

That can lead to a life of discovery (to address the OP) where you can better yourself in terms of being more valuable to others and hence improve your connectivity. Likewise public service, volunteerism, activism and philanthropy.
The worst thing that could happen to us is to give up. That leads to anti-social behaviour like Columbine and suicide bombing or even just depression.

To borrow from a real estate slogan

Connection, connection connection

That is the supreme goal of our lives.

45

Well, if you really want to know…

There are several approaches you could take to this question. You could turn to philosophers. Plenty of great and not-as-great philosophers down through the ages have tried to address these questions. The Existentialists, for example, say that the only meaning or value in life is what you, yourself, choose to give it. This view has already come up in this thread, but it is only one among many. Even if it were possible to summarize philosophy’s main answers here, I’m certainly not qualified to do so, but this is one avenue worth exploring if you are so inclined.

Or you could turn to religion. Many, many people have found answers and meaning in religion, ranging from the simpleminded to the deep and complex. In fact, this is arguably what religion is: an attempt to address the questions you’ve posed. If you’re really interested in the answers, you owe it to yourself at least to see what the major religions have to say about them. Though I can say from sad experience that even religious belief doesn’t necessarily help you know where you, personally, fit in and what your own life should be aimed at in particular.

You might find purpose in your life’s work, your vocation or avocation, whatever that might be. Is there something you’re really interested in or enthusiastic about? What were you put on this earth to create or solve or accomplish? For example, Beethoven was seriously depressed and suicidal at times but kept on living and creating music. If you don’t know now what your life should be devoted to, don’t give up hope yet; I’m sure there are plenty of places you’ve never been and things you’ve never even tried to explore.

Lots of folks find meaning in their relationships with other people. If you’re in love, or if you have children who depend on you, or if you’re part of a happy, functional family, or if you have mutually rewarding friendships, or if there are people whose lives you brighten in some way, this can go a long way toward giving your life direction and making it feel worth living.

Then there’s the medical/psychiatric approach. If you’re clinically depressed—and it sounds like you may well be—this in and of itself can make life appear pointless and keep you from finding meaning. See Loopydude’s post. Adjusting your brain chemistry isn’t the whole answer, but it can make you much more fit to keep going as you pursue an intellectually/spiritually satisfying answer.

46

I don’t think there’s a universal reason for living. It’s largely individual: figure out what’s important to you and what goals you’d like to achieve while you’re living, and work toward them. Some people feel their goal is to “just be happy.” That’s a pretty broad goal, and you need to figure out specifically what it is that makes you happy, and try to work toward that.

If you’re looking for a point to human existence as a whole, either from a religious standpoint or not, I really don’t think you’re going to find one. I’m no longer religious, but after having read several religious texts from several different cultures, I’ve only found the most general and amorphous reasons for us being here. (“Doing God’s work” never cut it for me as a good reason, nor does “Because the gods were lonely.”) I always felt that if even those texts that are supposed to tell me why God or the gods put us here couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer, I’d have to find one myself. If it does turn out that there’s a god, hopefully what I want is parallel to what he/she/it wants. However, I have come to think that there’s a very strong possibility that human evolution is accidental - we could have wound up as just another blip in the history of the planet, and that might still happen, depending upon whether or not our planet survives our existence. All this leads me right back to my original conclusion that you have to figure out what makes you happy (preferably something that doesn’t hurt you, your loved ones, and minimizes harm to where you live) and do that.

In the event you do find a good answer, be sure to e-mail me. I’d hate to find out that I’m actually here for a reason but completely unaware. :wink:

47

No, no, no. That is the problem. There has to be some reasoning on how you decide. Their has to be some basis for the decision and it should be universal for all people. The universe is ultimately rational (if it wasn’t than there would literally, be no point to anything) so there has to be a guiding logic behind deciding “why should I go on?”

The only unifying characteristic I can see between the examples given by many people is that it must be some form of creatively productive work if you wish to be happy.

48

Well, no, there doesn’t. Some people simply want to live because life, overally, is fun. They don’t have any god reason to feel like life is good, they just do.

I can assure you, the only universals are beyond your control. They’re simply not worth worrying about.

I can only say that I have yet to see any evidence that makes an argument for purpose compelling. Maybe there is a “guiding logic”, but if you ever find it, you might be the first one to do so.

Maybe that’s a consensus answer, but it’s not the only one.

For me, I have no idea if life has meaning or not. I have to operate under the assumption there may be no logically sound reason for being, except this: I’m greedy. I want to enjoy myself. I like to eat, sleep, have sex, travel, work, not work, etc. I have the capacity to derive pleasure from such activities, and this pleasure is a strong incentive to keep doing them. In other words, being alive gives me more opportunity to be happy, so far as I know, than not being alive. If, when I’m not alive, my mind is destroyed and I no longer have thought of any kind, then my living state is all I will ever know. It’s my one shot. If I lose my life, I lose everything, both the good and the bad.

Again, it sounds to me as if you’ve got a run-of-the-mill case of major depressive disorder. I won’t say you’re not thinking rationally, because I think depressed people actually sometimes have a more rational view of the world than not-depressed people. You may be recognizing quite rightly that there is no point in any of it. You’re just worm food in the end, and as one of billions who happen to be alive right now, your contribution to the big picture may not add up to much more than a bucket of snot. There may be no benevolent God who wants good things for you, and if you stick it out to the end, will deliver you to Paradise. There’s really nothing stopping you from not living except your own animal fear of death, which you may see as a major annoyance at this point, more than anything.

I’m saying you may very well be 100% correct. In fact, I tend to think you are (though many would disagree with me most stridently). You know what? I don’t care. I really don’t. Why? I don’t know. I’m lucky. I’ve found or been given the things I need to have what we call generally good emotions, and hence being alive is its own reward. If I become depressed in the future, I will doubtless feel like my prior bout of happiness was a joke, some kind of illusion. Probably, it was. Well, so what? It was better than being depressed, so if I come to that point I remember that things can be different and work hard at doing whatever I need to do to my brain to get back to a euthymic state. Chances are, it won’t be so much through logic as through conditioning and chemicals.

Trust me: These Big Questions just don’t matter all that much. They’re certainly worth thinking about in an academic sort of way, but they’re not essential at all. Not knowing if there is a purpose is 100% OK, and no one’s happiness, as far as I can tell, is predecated on knowing the Answers, even if they’re knowable at all.

49

I suppose everyone has their own special Zen that works for them. Your goal in life is to find YOUR Zen. What balance of education, recreation, religion, family life, solitary life, and all the other “life” things works best for you? That is your assignment grasshopper, report back when you have found your balance.

50

My goal in life is to have a goal in life.

51

Goals are for trendsetters.

52

Why? People decide all kinds of things without using reason.

If there was some universal means for giving purpose to life, everybody would do it.

Is it? It is ordered and predictable. But rational?

Possibly there is no point to anything. This can be a depressing thought. But, if there’s no point to anything, than suicide is also pointless.

Not for me. I suffer from chronic depression. There came a point when I asked myself why I didn’t just commit suicide. The main reason-hatred. I have to pull myself out of this pit and achieve the things I know I can so that I can track down all the people who laughedf at me over the years and rub their faces bloody in my success. But if I kill myself, I prove them right and they win. The game may be going against me now, but I’m not beaten yet.

There doesn’t have to be any logical reason for you to go on living. Hope and love are powerful motivators that are not logical in the slightest.

53

Nope…sorry. No Universal Secret of Life[sup]TM[/sup] No algorithm to follow that will make you completely happy. I mean what’s the point of the Earth spinning around the Sun for billions of years only to eventually be consumed in a big fireball when it explodes?

The things that make you happy might not work for someone else. You could have a single-minded driving life ambition and then wake up at 40 with no friends, unmarried with nothing but your work. You could drift through life doing nothing but be a likable guy who achieves little or nothing but who everyone loves. In general, having a balance of good friends and family relationships, a successful career, decent income, good health are all things that tend to make people happy. The reason we don’t just end it all is because we take enjoyment in little things here and there - reading a book, getting drunk with some buddies, getting blown by a Mexican prostitute, whatever. There doesn’t have to be a rhyme or reason to it.

54

The words of the preacher have always been a comfort to me.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for

there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave,

whither thou goest."

But even more so, “Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity.”

To me, these are words of hope not hopelessness. The very thing that seems to make others despair, can make one happy.

Also, remember, “This too shall pass.”

55

Wow, lee. I was just getting ready to come in here and say, this thread is sounding more and more like the book of Ecclesiastes.

I guess there really is nothing new under the sun.

56

I’ve probably posted this before. But, what the heck.

The message of Ecclesiastes is that nothing humans do is worthwhile, lasting or worth doing. The author tells us so in high poetry written centuries ago. The medium defeats the message.

57

In the Bible God commands man to multiply and have dominion over nature. I read into this that we should master not only the physical world but human nature. We should do all we can to relieve others from suffering and stamp out the mindsets that lead to it.

In a way, we should seek to achieve that connection with each other and our world that religions such as Buddhism refer to as nirvana and that Christianity hints at as heaven.

Indeed there is a universal reason for existence. And whether you believe we were created for that purpose or accidently evolved to the point where we could ask “why?” only determines whether we are predestined for an end or decide to make it our goal, and if the latter it is a goal that only flows naturally from our existence.

Life is pointless without goals. Sure, you can enjoy the little things, and certainly they add to our own life’s enrichment. But you have to look beyond yourself and focus on others. This is true to have successful relationships and to bring about social change. You have to focus on the goal.

Most people will not be revolutionaries, but I think this is due in large to apathy, or at least not caring strongly enough. You really have to sit back, think of what needs to be changed, examine your own abilities, and think hard about how you can use them to make a difference. I can’t overemphasize using your mind. Today, I was reading Fahrenheit 451. A character brings up a point that we stuff ourselves so full of facts and knowledge that we feel smart without using our minds to truly think.

It will take hard work, but nothing worth fighting for is easy.

58

By the way, don’t forget the multiply part. Make lots of sperm and get laid buddy. :slight_smile:

59

This is a mistranslation. A more accurate translation would be ‘Take care of this, be careful with it.’

60

Interesting interpretation, I have not heard that one since my sophmore year.