Category: Purpose

This category groups together our posts on a greater purpose in life.  By discussing and talking  about subjects that could motivate you or ourselves into doing something bigger than just us.

The World is Great

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I gotta say, we are awesome.  I mean have you ever taken a second to really think about how the world is great?  I cannot even begin to list all the things humanity has created and achieved. From our newest technologies to our insightful thoughts of the universe, we truly are an astonishing species.  The steps we have taken in such little time is absolutely remarkable.

Okay, here’s an example: take a second to consider what this little electronic box you are looking at is.  This device has capabilities that can range from watching a show about the daily life at the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company to sending texts across the country in the blink of an eye. Like… what?

Not to mention what a text message is.  I mean how in the world did we go from grunting and groaning at each other to creating words like gabelle (which means a tax on salt for some reason).  Somehow we were able to create a system that allowed for our thoughts to be presented in a structured way so that others could literally read about them.  This system was then spread and understood by billions with slight variations depending on the region.  

So what else?  Oh right, has anyone else taken a second to admire our ability to keep one another alive?  Sure we have individuals that try to shorten our lives, but wow do we have a lot of systematic ways to keep each other going.  Medicine is a compound, created by us humans, to prevent or treat most known diseases. Somehow we figured out that by combining certain herbs and chemicals we could create a remedy that not only improves our health but can also treat and cure certain illnesses.  I would love to give a high five to the first guy who did that magic trick.

We can also look at the outstanding structure of our communities.  I can literally get hurt almost anywhere and then a fancy motor vehicle will cruise in and take me to a place that is strictly designed to handle people in physical need.  And if I get hurt by someone else’s actions, a much scarier vehicle comes over and handles the situation with a bit more force. These services just happen. I do not know these people, but regardless they come and save my ass.  

Once they are done doing that, I typically get billed money.  Now, although money can be the root of a lot of evil, it is also a super helpful solution to an assortment of other problems we take for granted.  Money lets us work together. It gives us a numeric way to trade services so that we can pursue almost any job we want. Without money, I could really only feel safe being a farmer, as that is the only job I would be guaranteed a steady income.  If I was a carpenter, I would not be useful to a doctor, since we both have to eat and neither of us would have much food to trade. Money lets us work together in just about any profession we choose.  

What baffles me the most about all of these luxuries we take for granted is that we barely even know how they work.  The majority of us have no idea how it is possible to read this post I have written in a location different from the one you are in now, at a time different from now.  Or how the first person was able to make the sound of the word “thank you”. Or how medicine even begins to work. We have these luxuries and only understand each enough to use them, which I think is the coolest thing we have done yet.  Our ability to share and save information. It only takes one person’s discovery to improve the lives of billions.  

Now yes, I know there are a ton of problems in this world.  I know that billions suffer every day. I know that many of our discoveries eventually backfire or become used for the wrong purposes.  But I also know that the majority of them turn out to help everyone, even if it’s just a little bit. So as you sit in your cooled off room on this hot summer day because of a magic box that produces cold air, remember that although we have our problems, we also have found so many solutions.

Effort and Apathy, Saved by Fred Rogers

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Fred Rogers aired the first episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1968 with a very specific goal in mind, he sought to bring a positive change to children’s television. Right around the air date Bobby Kennedy was assassinated and in the show he worked to explain the concept of assassination to children watching the program. This was not an isolated incident, he spoke on death, racism, war and many other challenging subjects that children had not yet been exposed to. On the surface these episodes seemed simple with some puppets talking bullshit for twenty-five minutes and then Fred coming in to talk about something challenging for five minutes, but this wasn’t the case at all! Every episode had a message ingrained in it, the topics discussed were extremely well thought out and were able to educate the children in an inoffensive way.

Fred Rogers is a hero of determination. In a market where children’s shows could be cheap, easy to produce, and profitable he instead took a vastly different approach. Fred Rogers didn’t have to, but he did because he believed in something. We must all find something to believe in.

My mom always used to say to me “leave this place looking better than you found it.” and I think that is what we should do with our world. It is very easy to be apathetic. We are all tiny pieces of an ever-growing puzzle currently sitting at seven and a half billion pieces. So, it is easy to just fade away into the background, to just be okay. But it isn’t okay to be okay! It is not possible to leave the Earth in a better state than you found it by just passing through, you must strive towards something.

I don’t want to be misconstrued, you do not have to go out of your way to do as much good as possible for everyone around you. What you must do however, is at least fucking try. Try to do life with some, “oomf”, put in some work, and take the time to make things run a little bit better. Imagine how wonderful the world would be if everyone put effort into their relationships, if they really strived to make them loving and strong. Now imagine if everyone put effort into their jobs, didn’t half-ass anything, imagine how much smoother the world would run.

There is one more part to this equation, a step between apathy and determination, and that’s motivation. Motivation is driven by love and by hate. It is a deep and personal drive to achieve something you are unsatisfied with. If one hates their image, they become motivated to change it. If one loves the idea of being more wealthy, they strive to be wealthy. I am no different. I hate my depression, truly and sincerely. I hate it so much that not only do I hate it in myself, I hate that others have to experience it as well. I have channeled this hate into motivation, a motivation to fix a problem that is plaguing the world.

There is no determination without motivation, and without either there is apathy. I fear a world where we all become apathetic, where everything becomes too grand for us to feel important. So to those reading this, I would like you to ask yourself, what are you driven by? If the answer is that you don’t know, or that it’s too hard to achieve, search harder. After all there really is only one wrong answer here and that is that is “it does not matter”. So I encourage you now, search deep and find what motivates you, then put it into action. You will be doing the world a favor. I will leave you now with a quote by Norman Vincent Peale, I hope that it helps you on your way, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”.

Discovering Your Strengths and Weaknesses

What are your strengths and weaknesses? A rather simple question, yet so hard to answer. 

We see these questions come up in interviews, rehabs, conventions, emotional talks, essentially anytime we are expected to feel vulnerable. Times that we are told to look inside ourselves and reveal the light and darkness that makes us who we are. The joyful, energetic, fun, hilarious parts of us, along with the sad, angry, insecure, empty, dry parts of us.

This two-sided question is rarely asked of us and is typically avoided at all costs. We do not want to share these parts about us because it leaves us truly exposed. If you explain what is good about you, then you are saying what you take pride in. Whether it be the interviewer, social worker, friends or family, these people hear what you are proud of and then have the liberty to decide if they agree. They decide whether it be out loud or in their head if what you think is good about yourself is even present.

On the other side of this two-headed dragon of a question, you are asked to reveal what you hate about yourself. You are asked to talk about the thing that you may try every day to minimize and control, but continually fail. Then, as you talk about that thing, these people again have the freedom to decide if this trait is manageable or too much to handle for whatever the situation.

So, what are your strengths and weaknesses? In an unpressured, nonjudgmental manner I encourage you to find the answer to this question. Seeing ourselves for who we really are is one of the single hardest, yet rewarding, things we can do. 

It is crucial because once you know the answer to that question you begin to understand yourself from a better perspective. You can begin to understand your actions and emotions when certain situations occur. You then start to see yourself for who you really are and begin accepting both sides of yourself. Once you start to do that, I would bet your weaknesses will start to feel like strengths. 

I have found that the more of myself that I accept, the happier I have been. I cannot imagine you are much different. 

My strengths include my self-motivation, emotional awareness, and resilience. My weaknesses are my impatience, inability to be vulnerable in front of others, and overthinking. These are the things about myself that I have accepted and will continue to accept because they make me who I am. The good and the bad, the right and the wrong. 

And by no means am I ashamed of them. I do not hide these weaknesses and expect them to magically disappear one day. I have accepted them, and I am addressing them in the attempt to never have these weaknesses hold me back in life. And because of this I see myself for how I am, good and bad, wrong and right, happy and sad. 

Therefore, I will ask you one last time, what makes you strong and what makes you weak? Find your answer to this question and be aware that it may change as you do. Desires and fears are always changing as you experience life. This is why you must always be refreshing the question. Always battling the two-headed dragon with a different weapon, different strategy, different outlook. The dragon will never change, but how you slay it will define you time and time again. Your body and mind are forever changing until your inevitable death, so never stop questioning who you are. You live with yourself your entire life, you might as well get to know the person.

Our Life Goals

What’s your life goal?  Woah, big question right.  It’s hard to answer. By answering that question you’re essentially saying why your alive. Why you’re getting up every day and doing as you do.  You are stating your purpose in life.

As intellectual creatures, it would appear that we need to be striving for something.  This need to achieve is arguably what fueled the first ideas of religion and how our economy works.  We need something to reach for or else we will become unmotivated and stop intellectually and/or physically growing. (In essence, I call this purpose as being content)

I have heard many different life goals, yet as I debated over my own, I believe I have found one that sums them all together.  A goal that incorporates everyone’s life purpose, a commonality between all people.

Before stating that, I should explain some good life purposes I have heard before.  Some of which I have considered as my own at one point or another.

One, to make as many people on this earth as happy as possible.  Some of the most compassionate people are run by this life purpose.  They devote their lives to helping people in need. This is a very selfless life goal, but also an inevitably pointless one.  As of now, we see life inevitably ending. This means that everyone will die twice. We will physically die and then eventually be completely forgotten along with everything we did and thought.  Because of this current truth, all the efforts of these compassionate people will eventually lead to nothing.  Without some form of scientific modernization, this problem of the inevitable ending will continue to discredit life goals.

Two, to survive.  This is a very basic life purpose, typically held by people in situations where they do not have the luxury of free time or simply choose to not use it in a productive way.  With the lack of free time also comes the lack of free thought and ways to enhance that thought. You see this is most often in the lower classes of society. Essentially, the people pushed down by others to the point that they only think in the lowest of necessities. This goal of survival is true for everyone, but it is simply too basic to be satisfying for humanity as a whole.  We like to see ourselves as more than just animals, it is satisfying to think. Although many may disagree with that concept, I do like the effect it has on our species as a whole, it motivates us to thrive for more than what we think we are capable of. Therefore, we should look to a greater life goal, one that feels more fulfilling.

Three, to improve and increase humanity’s knowledge.  These are the scholars of our society. They find life can only be purposeful if knowledge is added to it.  Knowledge separates us from the thousands of different species that coexist with us on this planet. By improving humanity’s knowledge, we are improving humanity as a whole.  This is the driving force behind almost all scientific experiments and theoretical testing. A problem with this goal is that it lacks compassion. It does not care about the wellbeing of individuals but simply cares about making humanity more educated.  Notice I said educated and not smarter. Some studies have found that our intelligence is broken up into different sections. This was first theorized by psychologist Howard Gardner. His research in Harvard University found that intelligence is broken up into eight subcategories (Kapıcıoğlu, 2018).  By increasing humanity’s knowledge without any compassion for humanity we would lose touch with some of our subcategories of intelligence. For instance, interpersonal and social intelligence would come at the cost of apathy.  This is counterproductive because the purpose of this life goal is to educate humanity, but by doing so we make humanity ignorant.

Four, to make the human race immortal.  Immortality is the ability for something or someone to live forever.  It was explained to me that individual lives have no purpose if their memories and good times will eventually be lost with the inevitable death that currently awaits us all.  So, to make life meaningful death must not be required. Immortality would allow our basic day to day life to be meaningful. A flaw I see with this logic is that even if we achieved immortality our memories will not be fully intact after hundreds of years.  As we live our lives we forget more and more of what we once experienced compared to what we experience now. Can you even remember what color shirt you wore last Thursday? This logic can also be cracked by the inevitable destruction of our solar system and eventually our universe.  So even if we as humans become immortal our universe is not. For life to exist, death will probably always be inevitable no matter what we genetically alter in our DNA.

I have found that most people fall within these four examples of an individual’s life purpose.  If yours does not exactly fall into one of these four then I’m sure a combo of them will help match with your life goal. (Or maybe a fifth purpose such as mindfulness)

My life goal is the sum of all these types of people.  I find in many ways we are more alike than we are different.  In some situations we are the immortals that long for life to never end, and at other times we are the survivalists that put our heads down and get the job done.  We also care about the people we love and long to know about the things we care about. I think all of our life goals should be to make a future where humanity works together rather than against itself.  An economy that does not pin us against one another to survive. A lifestyle that does not limit us to thinking a job is our only purpose. An emotional state that does not let individuals get addicted to objects rather than people.  We, together, should strive to create a world that everyone works with one another. Once we are working together time will be spent achieving, rather than existing.  

We would sympathize with our neighbors and not let them struggle.  Once they are no longer struggling and are out of the survivalist mode then they can help others.  The more people that are physically and emotionally stable means the more people we have thinking together on how to grow humanity’s knowledge.  More brains being put together in trying to understand what this universe is really about. Simply because we see life to its core being meaningless now does not mean it has to be.  Life does not have to end with death if we discover there is another option. There are an infinite number of things we can discover because we do not know if they exist until we find that they exist, it is that simple.  And the best way to find them is to have the most minds working together.

This life goal has steps.  Improve the lives of individuals so that they do not have to be in the survivalist mode and can instead contribute to humanity’s knowledge, which could possibly lead to unimaginable discoveries…. much more than just being immortal.  Optimize the quality of life, end survivalist mindset, add to humanity’s collective pool of knowledge, and achieve unimaginable things. These are the steps that I believe would lead humanity in the right direction. A direction with purposeful lives and happy people.  This is my life goal, what’s yours?

 

Work Cited

Kapıcıoğlu, B. (2018, January 10). Multiple Intelligence Theory and Types of Intelligence. Retrieved May 29, 2018, from https://www.mentalup.co/blog/multiple-intelligence-theory-and-types-of-intelligence

My Purpose

I’m beginning this article now, appropriately, sitting on the curb in a McDonald’s parking lot. I’m here to tell you that life sucks, or at least it can suck. See when things are going to shit it can seem like they will always stay that way, this plays into the concept of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is exactly as it sounds, it occurs when a person possesses the belief that no matter what they do, bad things that are going to happen will happen. So at that point when we’re down in the gutter, when life gives us a shit sandwich and not even a napkin or a cup of water, what are we to do? The answer to such a question, is ironically enough another question, and that is “What is my purpose?”. I promise I’m not going to run you around in circles here with vague philosophical answers, I’m going to try to answer that question the best I can, and answer it with inclusion of all beliefs and backgrounds in mind.

I’ve been living with depression for the better part of three years now and with that depression suicidal ideation has never trailed far behind. When you are suicidal you are at the point where you’re in a high noon situation with yourself, a classic duel between you (presumably the sheriff) and your depression (the bastard trying to raid the town). To win this duel you must produce an ideology to pull yourself out of it, that’s your weapon, your trusty piece. Also I will note, this is an extreme case, but can still be applied to anyone who has gone through a tough spot in their life (i.e. literally everybody). The ideology, or better put, purpose that I was able to produce out of this has to do with the human condition.

When thinking about our purpose popular trends tend to lean towards the nihilistic or the religious. Many believe that ultimately there is no purpose, that we will live or die leaving no distinguishable mark upon the universe. Others believe in a god, or a spiritual afterlife,  that is testing us or observing us and that we operate to serve that power. Now personally I reject the latter claim being as I was never able to find a faith or religion myself, however my claim does not discredit a theology in the least, but can coincide or reinforce it. Now on the former claim I do believe that in the grand scheme of things we do not matter, and all of our actions will eventually be forgotten; However, we are not in the grand scheme of things. We live in the now, we are emotional, and the things done now matter now. Ideologies looking at the grand scheme of things put us in the position of emotionless beings able to see the whole picture, but that is not us, which leads me to a more optimistic conclusion.

So during my darkest moments I asked myself “What if I will never be happy again?”, and then it hit me like bird shit on a hot day. I realized that happiness is the most important thing to the human condition. Think about all of the decisions that you make on the day to day, really think about them. Do you do anything that doesn’t in some way promote the happiness of yourself or others? Put quite simply, we like being happy, one could be the most unfortunate person on the planet and still live a wonderful life if they have found happiness in it. So I believe that our purpose here on this Earth is simple. We are here to try to make everyone as happy as possible on this crazy fucking ride we call life.

So to go back and answer the question “What if I will never be happy again?”, my answer now is that that is irrelevant. Even if it was possible that I would never be happy again (and I don’t think it is barring any sudden death) then it is still my purpose to try to promote the happiness of others, because we’ve got one go of things. We’ve invested so much time into our own lives, and have only got one ride on it, so while we’re here we might as well try to make the world as happy as we can possibly make it. I believe with all my heart, that that is our purpose here, and I hope that in your darkest time you can find some comfort in it. I know I have.