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19. Purpose and Meaning

George Mallory is a British Mountaineer who participated in a few expeditions to the Mt. Everest before it was scaled. When a reporter asked him why he wanted to climb Everest, he said, “Because it’s there.”

We don’t even think about most actions we do in our lives. For most of us, our morning habits are so mechanical that we just go through with them without thinking about them. Most of the time, we are lost in our thoughts. This is true for every habit. Like when you cycled for the first time, you are thinking about your posture, your pedaling, the road in front and so on. But once you are used to it, you only look at the road and the rest just flows through.

But when it comes to bigger things in our lives, we tend to think a lot about it before we set goals. We find ourselves living in this world which seems to be predictable enough to allow us to plan for our future and set goals, unpredictable enough to keep us on our toes and has laws which makes it challenging to achieve our goals. And as we have seen earlier, we don’t understand much of the fundamental nature of reality.

Considering this situation, one might ask what is the point of setting these goals? What kind of goals must one set? What is the purpose of life?

The easiest and simplest answer would be to just do what you want to do. Don’t think too much about it. What if I just want to eat burgers everyday, watch TV and nap? You might say that I won’t have money to buy burgers if I don’t do anything else. So I would have to go to work to achieve that goal. Fine!. I find a desk job that I take up, do it reasonably well to not get fired. Use the money to just buy burgers, watch TV and go to sleep. Do you think that this is a good way to live my life? If not, why?

How do you possibly convince someone to lead a healthy life and have healthy goals? Goals like wanting to start one’s own business, running a marathon, climbing a mountain, doing a triathlon, reading 20 books a year, building a family and raising good children. These are all goals which we consider healthy. If someone asks why you want to climb the mountain, you could just say, “Because I want to.” Or you can say, “Because it’s there.” No one would bat an eye. But if someone’s goal is to just eat a burger, watch TV and take a nap, you ask him why and if he says, “Because I want to,” you may be pissed. But you can’t make any rational argument to convince them otherwise. You can say that these habits will reduce his lifespan. And they will reply that they don’t care.

The above argument is what leads to nihilism. It is based on the core belief that life has no intrinsic meaning or purpose. If you ask the Why question about anything you want to do in life, you are taken in an infinite regress like we saw with the Münchhausen trilemma. Our options here are the same

Dogmatic goals

Circular goals

Dogmatic goals are just goals without any great reasoning behind them. You pursue those goals because you want to pursue them. There is no reason you have to give anyone except “Because I want to.” Circular goals can be fun too - I want to stay healthy because I want to stay happy and I want to stay happy because I want to stay healthy.

With nihilism, you accept the fact that there is no intrinsic meaning or purpose in life and succumb to it. To counter nihilism arose two other philosophies - existentialism and absurdism. Both these philosophies agree that life inherently doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning or purpose. Existentialism says that this doesn’t mean you have to give up. You have the ability to create your own values, morals, meaning and purpose in life. As can be summarised by the quote of Nietzsche, one of the greatest existentialist thinkers:

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

If you have a purpose to your life, you can bear any kind of pain. You see people who set goals around climbing the mountains around the world. These people go through a world of pain. Cold weather, altitude sickness, physical and mental stress. Yet, they brave through all of this to achieve their goals. These are usually dogmatic goals or circular goals which people set for themselves. You have this short period of life. Make the best out of it.

Absurdism, on the other hand, says that the universe is absurd and impossible to understand. If you try to build your own purpose and meaning, it sends you in a hopeless loop. Instead, one must embrace the absurd and enjoy it by living freely. Existentialists might argue that living freely itself is the kind of purpose existentialists recommend.

Here is a quote for you by Marvin the robot from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

All these philosophies started trending over the last couple of centuries. The reason being the slow death of religion. When we discussed morals, we saw how religions gave us some brute laws of morals. Whether they liked it or not, people were expected to follow it. Though religious laws can be considered problematic by modern people, it saved people from the struggle to find their morals, the struggle which we are facing now.

The same is the case for purpose. All the religions made it clear how to live your lives. Abrahamic religions tell you what you have to do in your life to reach heaven. Eastern religions use concepts like moksha and nirvana and guide people to attain them by proposing different ways of lives. There is the path of devotion, path of knowledge, path of meditation, path of giving up desires and so on.

If you don’t believe in any of the religions, you are stuck in the triangle of nihilism, existentialism and absurdism.

Further Reading