Is the purpose of life to be happy?
Is the purpose of life to be happy?
When I’m unhappy, I feel like I’m doing life wrong. I’d rather be happy. But is happiness the point of life, or is there more to it? If I pursue happiness, mine first then for those around me, is that selfish? But if there’s a bigger purpose, then what about people with Alzheimer’s or dementia who can’t recall recent experiences or make plans?
There is no purpose in life. Like others have said, the fact that we're all here and life exists at all is entirely an incredible accident. As that's the case, how could we have any inherent purpose?
The endless pursuit of a purpose can actually make you more unhappy.
I'm a big fan of positive nihilism. Everything has occurred by random chance and there are no inherent truths or any purpose to anything. Nothing we do actually matters in the grand scheme of the universe. So, since nothing matters, I am free to exhert my free will and give value to what I choose.
I want to live a life where my perspective is, on the whole, a positive, happy one, and I want to create as many opportunities for others to do the same as possible. I do not want to tolerate those that use their freedom to steal the freedom of others or who seek pleasure at the pain and cost of others. I want to utilize my freedom to seek pleasure and joy and bring pleasure and joy to others without causing pain and suffer.
Nothing matters, so choose the life you want. There is no right or wrong way to live.
There is no objective purpose to life. Some funny long molecules mashed into eachother a few billion years ago. Scientifically there is no evidence of cosmic purpose to anything.
It's your life. You get to decide what to do with it.
There are some goals which are generally considered to be nobel. Make the world a better place, for example... but that's a far cry from an absolute definition of purpose.
I'd refrain from thinking about a purpose and instead think of your values. Then, if you want, establish goals that align with your values.
Being happy could be a goal for you , but that's not the same as a purpose.
Life IS the purpose. If you're alive, you're already fulfilling your purpose whether you are aware of it or not.
I personally think the purpose of life is to reproduce. Everything we are is just because it made us better at surviving and multiplying. We are merely animals.
I dont think we need to have kids just because that's what we exist for. We're intelligent enough to go against our basic instincts if we wish. In that optic, we all need to find our own purpose!
We yearn for answers to why we're here, there's a reason religion has been such a huge part of there human consciousness for so long, our brains are hard wired to find reasons for everything.
Since there is no known objective answer to this question, I'll answer it subjectively, recognizing that my life experiences have tainted my views.
Life has no purpose. People who do immense "evil" will not be punished. People who do immense "good" will not be rewarded.
Your existence is a beautiful, flighty phenomenon. You are a heap of octillions of atoms that somehow gained self awareness. Your happiness is merely a chemical exchange in your skull meat, it's fine to strive for happiness but it's fleeting.
I personally strive for serenity, accepting reality for what it is and making peace with it. Nothing matters, we're all going to lose the gift of consciousness through inevitable death, and that's okay.
Life is just a bunch of chemical processes. There's no more purpose to it than to meat rotting or wood burning.
The purpose of life isn’t clearly defined. That’s up to you, if being happy is a goal you want then go for it. My purpose in life is just to sustain my existence. That’s it. I work so I can pay to live and eat. And in my free time I do hobbies and things I like to entertain myself. Am I happy? I dunno, but I’m still here. That’s the best I can do. This life is all we have so might as well keep it going as long as you can.
There is no purpose to life. It’s all arbitrary. Life is whatever you make it to be.
Unless you’re physically incapable just about everything in life is a choice, including happiness and the pursuit of it.
Our biggest hurdle is our own mind.
There is no objective, defined purpose to life. People assign meaning and purpose to their life. Some people's purpose is to live in the way that their religion asks them to, some want a legacy so their purpose is to leave their mark on the world, some people live to help others, some live to be happy, some live to experience the world, some live until they die and that's it.
I'm no life coach, and I don't know you. I can't know if you're selfish or not, and I don't think there's a bigger purpose. If you want the 2 cents of some random guy on the internet, try to live in whatever way brings you the fewest regrets. Everything can be taken to an extreme (even happiness), and there's a tradeoff to everything.
I've always felt that life's purpose should be pursuit of knowledge and self expression in roughly equal proportions. So 50% science, 50% art. That's just what feels right in my brain, I guess.
I think most brains are just going to have their own idea of what life's purpose should be and most of them will be more or less fine. A majority will have said purposes stifled by the limitations of society and biology, though
A very philosophical question, so I'm going to ramble a bit:
I think there cannot be an objective purpose to anything, because any purpose can only go so far. E g. if the purpose of life is to be happy, then what is the purpose of being happy? And what is the purpose of that purpose, and so on? It never ends, there will never be a final answer giving everything before it objective purpose, because that is not how purpose works.
Purpose is a human concept, designed to structure our lives and to help us come up with sub-tasks for bigger goals. And it only really works if we fill in the final goal by saying "because I want that, for whatever reason". For many someone else fills in that goal and we just follow it, maybe feeling a little empty inside.
So I think the real question is, how do you find that final answer, and the only thing I can think of is: Whatever feels right to you. And right doesn't have to be happy, right means true to yourself imo. If you had a nice day then it might mean happy, but if you had a shitty day then it might mean seeking comfort or some distraction.
The one thing that can make this very difficult is having expectations about what you should be or feel, and those expectations not matching up with your subjective reality. We all have them, from our upbringing, our peers and experiences, and they can often be very subtle and subconscious. But they are only useful if they help you find your true self imo, otherwise they can be very misleading and painful.
The purpose of life (imo) is to discover humanity in yourself and what "the best human" means to you. People get their ideas on "the best human" from many inspired examples. The Buddha, Mohammed the Prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, Julius Caesar, or Jimmy Buffet. Some people need no such idols and can form their own understanding of what it means to be human, but all of these scale.
Your humanity plays into the identity of your family, plays into the identity of your city/town, plays into the identity of your region, plays into the identity of your nation, and at the top is the true meaning of life: the culmination of every dream and desire, the moral fabric of our species, and the embodiment of the only such entity in existence to our knowledge. The purpose of life is to find that, reconcile with it, and use the wisdom you gain in doing so to help shape our species into a happy, healthy, and mature civilization, or die trying.
LOL no. Happiness is an emotion, just like anger or sadness.
As for the purpose of life, there isn't one. Or if you're a philosophical nihilist, there isn't an inherent meaning to life, so it's up to each individual to come up with their own.
IMO try not to overthink it. Death still comes one to a customer so you might as well enjoy yourself while making the world a better (or at least not worse) place if you can.
I urge you to look into Buddhism. Not as a religion to do ritualistic shit but as a philosophy, as Buddha intended. The only purpose of Buddhism is to address what you're feeling right now.
Also check this video out. https://youtu.be/pBnH99Mqop4?si=rFGRX_sd9bibUF3f
The purpose of life is what you make it.
Society in my area says the purpose of life is to get a job, get married, and have some kids. All of these are optional but each one increases your perceived value to the government and to individual people. Some people work their entire lives conforming to societies expectations for them and still live what they would describe as unfulfilling lives.
Instead, or in addition to, I would suggest you focus on creating your own purpose. I would describe a purpose as a overarching objective for your life. I'll list some purposes that you could adopt.
- Provide companionship for those who you deem deserving.
- Care for others by providing a stable living environment.
- Guide people to make informed choices.
- Help others to use their resources wisely.
- Inspire peers to think about their purpose in life.
- Join and help an organized group that has an overarching purpose you want to contribute towards.
- Entertain other people and yourself.
- Make something you can share with others.
- Organize others to help achieve a shared purpose.
- Form your own opinions on how life should be lived and apply them.
These are a small sampling of purposes people adopt and you need not limit yourself to one. However be mindful that your attention is limited and each purpose can take a considerable amount of time. With that in mind try to pick goals and activities that help you achieve your purpose(s).
In pursuing your purpose, you will find moments of happiness. Embrace them. You will also find moments of frustration and anger. Understand why you feel this way and learn to embrace them as well. Understand when your emotions are clouding your judgement and learn to resist it when necessary.
Happy travels.
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The meaning of life is a blank page. Good luck filling it out!
This is quite the existential question! Of course, there’s really no “right” or “wrong” answer, and there are so many different ideas on what the meaning of life is.
My opinion? There isn’t one. The fact we exist at all is a wildly random event, and the fact we are conscious of it even more so. Life is meaningless, so we create our own meaning. For me, the meaning of life is to strive for happiness (not BE happy, we can’t be happy 100% of the time), bring happiness to those around me, and leave the world better than I came into it. I don’t give a shit about legacy, since I won’t be around to enjoy it. The only legacy I care about is that I made life better for the people I love.
Treat others with kindness, be mindful of the world you live in, and do more of what makes you happy.
Because of tripping on shrooms, I had a long think about the meaning of life. The following is from a comment I posted in another thread about the meaning of life:
I understood that "the meaning of life" was less about me or my species or even my entire planet and more about the universe, which I would describe as not just humbling, but an epiphany of ego death on a scale I'd never considered. I was searching for the meaning of life, and was initially disappointed to not find one, and then understood that the meaning isn't for me or us. We are merely a tool; a function.
Life is something that happened because it was possible, and it's been allowed to continue because it's expediting the natural process of masses and energies. All life absorbs matter and energy, breaking them down faster than they otherwise would. We're achieving entropy. Humans are especially good at this, burning material for heat, moving quickly over long distance, dreaming of escaping to other worlds to burn material elsewhere. With interstellar travel, we could be an entropic plague. The heat death of the universe gets a little closer every time we breathe or eat or drive our silly cars or fuck. Everything we do is fulfilling our purpose, so there's really no wrong way to live, and I find an awful lot of comfort in that.
The new Zelda game is fun, and playing it is my meaning of life this week.
The purpose of each person's life is for them to define.
It's not something that is assigned to you, and it doesn't have to be the same as anyone else's purpose.
And it can change over time as your experiences and circumstances mold the person you are.
I'd first ask you to define happiness.
Temporary pleasures will always be fleeting, unreliable, and fraught with danger. Drugs and alcohol feel great in the moment, for example. So does eating junk food and watching TV. But we all know the problems with these things.
Is happiness the pleasure brought by fulfilling hobbies? That's probably a little more productive, but also will never be continuous. And often, if you try to make that your entire life, it loses its joy. The recreation is often the joyful part.
Personally for me, my interactions with patients and being able to use my intellect to help people medically is so deeply satisfying that I'm motivated to go to work despite there being so many things to hate about my job. So that's an interesting wrinkle on the idea of happiness.
I'm not really trying to get at an answer here. We just had a whole meditation retreat at my church about this exact topic: What is the purpose of life? But maybe some ideas to help you clarify your own thoughts about the subject.
I think it kind of depends on how you define 'happy'. I do believe that if life has any point, it is to be happy. It's definitely harder than it sounds, and the path is usually long and differs from person to person.
I have spent a long time doing things I thought would make me happy. Often they did, in the short term, but not in the long term. Sometimes what makes me happy changes!
You can also intentionally change what makes you happy. Try new things, develop new habits. Maybe it's exercise, maybe it's feeding hungry people or political organizing. Maybe it's a hobby group.
It's your life, do what you want with it.
Personally the point to life for me is to find something I love and add to that space. I love music, so my purpose in life is to make music, be that playing live or mixing and mastering or composing songs or recording stuff. It's something I dream about, even though I already do some of these things.
But I'm just one guy. My personal subcribed to philosophy is absurdism. Nothing has meaning unless I give it meaning, so fuck you Im going to eat a pineapple with chopsticks.
The point to life is whatever you want it to be. If you need help finding that I would try tap into what you would love to create or what you would like to achieve.
That's a pretty high bar. In fact exaggerated focus on "am I happy" can sort of fuck you up. Focusing on what you appreciate is supposed to be better and make you happier. The cliché is "the meaning of life is to give life meaning" which is disgustingly Hallmark, but still has a fair point. Just do whatever - a good idea is to not get too existential if you can avoid it.
My purpose in life is to be happy. My primary challenge in life is to find the things in life that make me happy and try to find ways that those things can make other people happy.
Consider reading "Existentialism is a Humanism"
As a hedonist my answer is yes. Life doesn't have an actual point. It wasn't "made" on purpose but because it got the chance. What you make of it is your decision but since we have a brain that rewards us and a nociception that punishes us depending on how we use our life I suggest you choose your own purpose. Mine is to be happy. Even when I'm altruistic I'm secretly egoistic because I feel better when my environment feels good too.
no the purpose of life is to exist
Maybe flip it around? The point of unhappiness (or dissatisfaction) is to get the organism to change up what it's doing; to locate new goals and pursue them. That can mean engaging with others in different ways than you did before.
If you're satisfied, you mostly stick with what you're doing already. (Which might include seeking novelty as well.) If you're unsatisfied, you may be ready to ditch your current situation for a new one as soon as one comes up.
Dementia in elders is really freakin' sad. But there's a lot of difference in people's experience of it. I happen to know two people in their 70s suffering dementia, who have very different levels of unhappiness. (They also live in rather different situations, although both are in relatively rural settings. Both live with a spouse and with supportive neighbors.)
One is largely satisfied and comfortable; the other is often pissed off and frustrated. This seems to have a lot to do with what their attitudes and social interactions were like before the dementia set in.
Happiness is fleeting. You should seek contentment over happiness.
The only purpose to life is to live it. Beyond that, you have to find the meaning that suits you for yourself.
Del: sorry, I had a brain fart
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No.
Everyone has to figure out their own purpose
For me, the purpose is to experience life. The good, the bad, everything.
As an aside, happiness is a carrot / stick game. Evolution has ensured that its unobtainable for any length of time.
You're better off seeking contentment.
There is no inherent purpose.
The purpose of human life is to submit ourselves to the Idea.
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The purpose of life, is understanding.
Elemental bits of unconscious soul-awareness want to have their own experiencings, so they get caught in conceptions/lives, and have, at first, unconscious experiencings ( like a mass-of-bacteria or something ), and eventually that particular soul/atman evolves until it accidentally coincides with a human-category-life, and then, suddenly, it has self-determination/free-will/significant-karma, so now it becomes a pinball in the Universe-game...
Being fired around by the meanings it emitted into Universe, it tries applying unconsciousness-answers, and they just make things worse...
Eventually, it has reabsorbed sooo many meanings, that it becomes understanding/wise, and it realizes that this birth/striving/sickness/death cycle seems deranged, and desiring this endless cyclical-process is deranged, so it begins earning the yogas of mind, meaning, will, intent, etc, and then earns its ability to lift itself from the whole-process, up into aware-nonengaging, which is called "Blissful Clear Light" awareness, and it can simply dissolve into OceanOfAllAwakeSouls, seeing an endless-stream of Universes go by, every one crammed with unconscious & semi-conscious souls/atmans, who haven't yet earned their dissolving-into-the-ocean-of-AWARENESS that religious-types call "God", and .. all souls Realize.
Endless stream of countless souls, each getting its own cycle-of-lives, reaping what it sowed, no matter how many "lives" ago the sowing-of-that-meaning was...
the processing is perfectly efficient.
The Christian bible's "Jacob's Ladder" was a depiction of souls climbing "down" into matter & "up" from unconsciousness...
The Christian bible's "Prodigal Son" parable was about an individual soul/atman doing its down/up process: when it got fed-up with the false-answers, it turned within ( remember the root-guru of Christianity told them "The Kingdom of God is Within", telling them to be meditating ), and "climbing the inner-mountain", to use a buddhist phrase...
The Abrahamic religions use baptism to symbolize a soul immersing itself in unconsciousness & matter, then coming up/out of its unconsciousness...
The thing is, souls who haven't experienced anything, want to experience their meanings, and have their understandings, but they can't believe that "suffering" or "harm" etc are "real", so they dive-in, and try holding to symbols, which, of course, doesn't work...
Again, the Christian bible has an excellent symbol representing the truth:
in Revelations, John is given the Book Of Truth to eat, and he eats it, and it is syrupy-sweet in his face, but bitter in his belly, exactly as Truth itself is:
Symbolic-"truth" is naive/sweet, but real Truth is bitter, hard-earned, good aversion-therapy.
So, what to do, then?
Face into karma, face into one's evolution, as human-category-lives are extraordinarily-rare in Universe, so make maximal use of what glorious opportunity you've got.
Mom brought me up Catholic, but I experienced some memories that didn't even fit human-category-life, and, years-later, discovered they were soul-memories of other kinds of lives, which blew-up all the Abrahamic-religions, for me.
Want to get a hornet/wasp/bee out of your home?
Their sentience loves swimming ( it feels like swimming: sentience feels wet, in that kind of life ) into luminance & openness, so, simply darken/block all the ways you don't want 'em going, and light up where you do want them going, and make certain that no scent is overriding their free-will, and they should leave your home.
That method doesn't work with other families of insects, btw, so the experience-induced-understanding I gained from that soul-memory doesn't work for representing any other kind of 'em.
Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni was right about fish being really mentally-limited: if you want your soul's next life to be something other than human, go for the hive-insects, as they have awesome amounts of awareness for such teensy brains.
We only exist as temporary "clothes" that the souls underlying our lives are "wearing".
Learning/understanding is the whole point of everything.
The desire-for-experiencing of souls is what drives evolution: when that energy expires, the population/culture/civilization/species collapses.
It's simple, and "our kind" isn't the center of the Universe, as the various Abrahamic religions all insist we are ( in spite of evidence ).
shrug
Facing into karma, gently but relentlessly pushing oneself to evolve, to see just how competent/complete one can become, to experience as much meaning as one can, within one's meagre years, you know?
Evolution, internalized.
Among our kind there are 3 dimensions/layers/substances of mind:
- SurfaceMind, which dissipates every few hours
- underlying-LifeMind, which begins forming at conception, and shatters in death
- underlying-the-LifeMind Soul/CellOfGod/Atman/ChildOfGod/Rigpa, that ALL lives have driving them, until they die, when it detaches/goes-its-own-way...
Huston Smith's brilliant & profound book "World Religions" gave much of this, in its Hindu & Buddhist chapters, btw, in case you want some source who is established.
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