Do you have a true purpose in life? (9 replies)
6 - No. There is no such thing.
1 - No. I have not chosen one yet. <- My vote
1 - Yes. But I don't know what it is.
1 - Yes. And I know exactly what it is.
0 - Yes. It is divinely managed.
These results are informative - "No. There is no such thing" was the answer I least expected. It makes me aware that I am far from alone in wrestling with coming to grips with a universe that seems to lack inherent purpose. Thank you all for your input!
Friday, January 04, 2008
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3 comments:
I'm not entirely sure that "There is no such thing" is inherently equal to "struggling to come to grips with..."
I chose that answer because I simply don't think there's anything to come to grips with. It's very different from wrestling with something which lacks inherent purpose, in the same way that atheism is different from agnosticism. There's no wrestling involved. You can't wrestle with something that doesn't matter to you.
Whether something has a purpose or just exists doesn't matter that much. It's the HHGTTG principle: knowing the answer doesn't change anything.
Good call - it points out how many nuanced views there are in answers to high-level questions like this. While creating the poll I began to understand that you could not just select yes or no and get illuminating results.
I attempted to create buckets to catch everyone - it looks like I was successful, but the issue of fine granularity remains. I would likely be better informed by creating a post and asking for individual comments to share you-all's views...
Do you see any difficulty in living a full life without a purpose? You never seem to lack enthusiasm for living...
No, not really. I think if I did feel like there was something missing, I'd spend some time just like you're doing, trying to figure out what it is. At least, I hope I would. In the spirit of starting off the post you mentioned -
It's more that I have lots of little purposes - finding a house (ok, maybe a big one), looking forward to having pets, planning my garden, finishing up the aprons that I'm sewing...
Those priorities change from day to day and year to year, as well. I know for a fact that if I were to ask myself what my purpose was before I left for college, and again while I was at school, while I was dating my ex and then again now - the answers would be quite different.
Rather like the question of life after death, I'm more comfortable letting my mind work on the little stuff that I -can- influence. I can't see my way clear to spending too much time pondering existential randomness, because the answer really doesn't affect me. Kind of like playing "guess the number I'm thinking" with a little kid - I'm fairly certain it's one of those deals where even if I managed to guess the right answer, the universe would probably just change it on me again ;)
This isn't to say that there isn't something that I want out of life. The answer to that has always been a constant, and I don't expect it to change: To be happy. At any given moment in time the steps necessary to achieve that may differ, but the end goal is simple and unchanging. This may be closer to what you meant by the original question; if so, I apologize for running this 'round in circles!
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