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