Finding purpose

We do what people we care about tell us to do. They cite several reasons, and many of them are pretty sensible. But that doesn’t mean you have to be convinced of doing anything.

We’re all born in a different place, with different economic means, different intelligences, different everythings. And we all die differently too: naturally, by disease or by accident. But we’re all born, and we all have to die.

Accepting that, after a time in the future, we would not exist is something that most of us don’t think about (and those who do are tagged as having “suicidal” thoughts). Even though we know the fact that we’re going to die one day, we live our lives as though we’d live forever.

Then, when there are only a few minutes left before we stop existing, our whole lives flash before us, and we evaluate ourselves for the very last time. It’s like getting the result of the last test you’ll ever give. And trust me, you don’t want to regret the way you lived your life at that moment, because knowing that you wouldn’t be able to change it then would invoke a bad, hopeless sort of feeling.

Humans are smart enough to think about the reason for their existence. We have two names for the thing that we use to think. This “thing” is us, and is variously called the brain or the mind.

The former term is used when we’re talking about the biological and physical aspects of our being, and the latter is used when we’re referring to ourselves in the psychological sense.

We don’t “think” using our minds, we are our minds. When you’re thinking, or when you’re listening intently to what someone is saying, or when you’re writing or reading, don’t you often perceive that you’re hearing a voice inside your mind? It’d called subvocalisation. When we check this biologically using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging, in which an MRI is kept switched on for a duration, so that changes in brain activity can be seen with the passage of time), we find that the same regions of the brain light up when we’re subvocalising, as those when we’re actually listening to someone talk.

Interestingly, we’d expect not all brain regions to show increased activity when we hear someone speak without interpreting their speech, the process of which chiefly involves vocalising what is being spoken in own minds.

So this brain or mind or whatever you want to call it (let’s just call it “you”) is a powerful thing, only about 10% of which we currently understand. We only understand 10% of how “you” works. You came into this world, and saw its beauty and wonder. In other words, there are a whole lot of things out there, which we’ve collectively named the Universe, and we’re naturally curious about them.

Look how far we’ve come. It’s hard to even begin to imagine how far we’ve come from our tiny, truly humble beginnings – which we still don’t know about completely (the investigation into our past is continuing).

So then, why are we here? “That question doesn’t have a right answer,” is what many people would say. But I prefer saying that that question doesn’t have a wrong answer, the beauty of which is that what the answer to this question is, is completely up to you.

Why do we even want food, money, shelter, respect and companionship? Why do we say we need such-and-such things, when there isn’t really a reason-reason to need them? “Survival,” is what everyone says, but why do you want to survive?

That question can be better put as, why do you want to live? And the answer to that question is the answer to all the above questions. If you know why you want to live, you know why you want food, money, shelter, respect and companionship. You know why you’re here if you know why you want to live.

Finding purpose is one of the most important things one must do, for life is meaningless, directionless without purpose. One can never head in the right (or any) direction if one doesn’t know where one wants to reach. Our daily lives pass with such frivolities and noise, that we never spend time thinking about what we want to do with the lives that we’ve got.

Once that is clear, you’ll never be confused about what you should do at any time. Some people phrase “finding your purpose” as “setting your priority straight”, because they’re too afraid of people thinking of them as having a mental issue if they ask, “Why do you want to live?”.

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