I previously struggled with intense depression that lasted about 4 years. At the end of the four years, I had a realization that was so powerful that I haven't entered a period of depression lasting more than a week in the subsequent 4 years. My hopes are that this story, and the lesson learned by the end of it, may help others. In addition, its important to state that this is my story as it happened. I am one man, with one limited perspective on the world. I do not claim to know the details of everyone's situation and therefore do not pass judgement on their decisions regarding a very serious topic.
The story goes like this... In senior year of high school I 'formalized' my atheism. I'll save those details for another day, however, it suffices to say that I was confident that I was drawing the correct conclusion about the nonexistence of god. In thinking about the implications of a godless universe I realized the vastness of time, the insignificance of myself, and how nothing actually mattered. There is (or so I thought) no reason to do anything at all because its all going to be washed away in time. My drive to carry on vanished. Everything was futile, hopeless. Nothing I did mattered so why do anything at all -- why feel happy about anything at all?
I constantly thought of suicide. The ways I'd do it, the statements I'd try to make with it. It was an awful time, and it was all right in the middle of my undergraduate college experience. This continued on for a couple years as I tried as best I could with school while investigating how other people are able to cope with the magnitude of this concept. The reality I found was that most people don't cope with it, or rather, they cope with it by never even considering it. That only made things worse of course, everyone I'd talk to about this had almost nothing to say.
One day I decided I'd actually go through with it. As I lay on my bed I thought to myself "Alright, its been long enough. I've felt terrible and thought of suicide for years now. Either I'm going to man up and get this over with, or I'm just going to keep dreaming of doing it every day." So I bullied myself into finally committing to finish it, and there was a sense of relief. I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner. That was when I made the most fantastic discovery of my entire life, but first, some other things you should know.
During this time I was also struggling with being gay and, as a gay computer scientist myself, I found Alan Turing very interesting. It struck me as awful that he died in 1954, not long before The Beatles, free love, and the full onset of the civil rights movement. Just a few more years and he could have lived in, and possibly even helped to shape, a much more liberal society.
When I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner, I realized it was because I was never sure. I always hoped that I would find some clue that would change my mind. So I thought to myself: am I sure now? Do I have conclusive evidence that killing myself is the right thing to do? Am I certain there won't be some dramatic unforeseen shift in circumstances that would improve my life and make me not want to kill myself (like Turing missed out on)? No, I was not absolutely certain that life had no meaning.
We know so little of the universe and theres no way that any of us can be absolutely certain that suicide is the best choice without research that would take hundreds of years in understanding physics, the mind, and probably fields that don't even exist yet. Its possible that life does indeed have a purpose and we simply don't know it. The optimal thing to do is to continue on and do as best we can to discover this purpose -- because if there is a purpose, then actively looking for it is the smart way to find it. If there isn't a purpose, then the time we 'wasted' in search of a purpose wasn't really wasted after all because theres no way to judge whether it was time well spent without an ultimate purpose.
Getting back to the discovery... Probably mere hours away from killing myself, I realized that there was no way to know if killing myself was the right thing to do. There may be something to live for that I don't know about -- some overarching infallible truth embedded in the fabric of the universe that gives life meaning. This was a powerful idea: I should not kill myself because there may be a purpose of life. Now I decided to not kill myself...but what should I do next? I had no plans; after all, I had expected to be dead later that day. Well, it was simple. Nothing mattered except the thing that had kept me alive: the potential for a purpose of life.
I realized that every bit of my life should be based on discovering the purpose that may be embedded in the universe. The most important thing, the driving factor in all aspects of my life, indeed my very own reason for existence and purpose of life was to discover the purpose of life. "The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life." It is beautiful.
There are many questions and implications that come from realizing this purpose of being alive but for now this comment is long enough. If you're interested in hearing more, let me know. I've thought a lot about this and (in true HN fashion) am building some tools which use ideas that stem from this one. I hope that my story of how I walked right up to the precipice of death and decided to turn back to life helps anyone who is also struggling with such issues.
I'm glad it works for you, but I find it sad that atheism and life having no purpose depresses you. That life has no purpose effectively means that there is freedom. It is very scary, but we have to choose the purpose for ourselves.
What we "lose" (it was never there actually) is the belief in an external, all-knowing guiding force that somehow makes everything we do ok. However, there are still guiding forces you can choose to follow. They are within us.
Personally I think if there was such an external guiding force, it would make life meaningless.
>That life has no purpose effectively means that there is freedom. It is very scary, but we have to choose the purpose for ourselves.
I think that this is precisely what drives many people to insanity. We are not brought up to think that we are free. When we experience freedom (either intellectually or actually) we become overwhelmed. We quite literally don't know how to handle it.
We (in most of the West) are taught from birth that we must always subject ourselves to some authority. In the beginning, there was the parent. If we didn't please him/her, we did not survive. Then there was the teacher. If we did not follow his/her instructions, we were punished (regardless of whether or not our undirected pursuits were fruitful). Then there was our boss. If we did not execute tasks handed down from said boss in precisely the proper way, we were terminated. The fact that most of our (this generation's) parents were not entrepreneurial means that entrepreneurship was generally looked down upon. The "get a job, obey your boss" gene was passed down to the vast majority of us.
This all not even considering religious commitments (pastors, imams, rabbis, etc.). Or Government Officials, who we must subject ourselves to if we need social services of any kind. Then there is The Community, who indirectly pressure us to live as they do at risk of shaming and/or shunning. Then there is ... etc.
All of this is an incredible burden to bear for anyone. That is why most people don't explore this line of thought. Religion, workaholism, or familycentrism are all a whole lot easier than actually facing the void. If you've legitimately seen darkness and have decided to let it empower you, damn -- I commend ya. Most of us can't do it. Even Nietzsche -- who was pretty much the first to verbalize our secular freedom -- lost control in the end.
Life is what you make it. That doesn't mean it is a void, it means you have influence over how it turns out. If you find it scary, then I'd suggest you might want to look around you... there is a world that exists outside your head. Think about this conversation we're having, we've probably never met, yet I am more than just a thought that exists inside your head, I am a sentient being, and I am different to you yet I am your equal.
Whilst I cannot tell you what life means to you, I can reassure you there is more to life than nothingness. As Descartes put it "I think, therefore I am"... to me, in a funny way this is a precursor to duck typing, it doesn't really matter the form that life takes, if it resembles life then it is life.
>Life is what you make it. That doesn't mean it is a void
Life means nothing. There is no moral standard, universal ideal, or God to live up to or for. "Making" your life is painting a picture on a blank canvas. That is filling a void, and your saying "get out of your head!" is nothing more than your way of filling said void.
Regarding our conversation, yes, it is neat. However that it is neat doesn't magically infuse life with meaning. We are wherever we are, conversing, and life is still meaningless. I am still gazing into the void. And the void is still gazing back at you.
Regarding the cogito. That life exists in many forms does not give life meaning. The likeliest case is that life means absolutely nothing and that all there is is nothingness. We have no purpose here other than what we've invented for ourselves, and even then we have different conceptions of what that is. "I think therefore I am," and what next? That is the void.
Our wires are getting crossed here because of the differences in the use of the word 'void'. I'm saying the life we know is not devoid of other life, you are saying life is devoid of meaning. I think you accept that life exists, so the question moves onto what meaning does life carry...
There's an important point to consider here, and I hope you don't take offence... perhaps the reason you believe life is devoid of meaning is because you're asking the wrong question...
Let's consider the question... What is the meaning of a tree?
A person asking such a question has set out to find a succinct answer that fits with their understanding of what constitutes meaning. If they cannot find an answer, their conclusion is that trees are meaningless. However, this is us projecting our desires onto the tree, what we're really asking is 'what message do you have for me?', and message implies there was a sender of the message, so for those that do not believe in a higher power there is no sender of a message, so really you could predict the answer before its even asked (based on who is answering it).
Furthermore, it's important to understand just because a question is simple to ask, does not mean the answer has to be simple, or even mean there is an answer at all. Let's say I asked you... What do words mean? The question was posed in 4 words, and is a valid English sentence. However, when you think of answers, you see that the question is nonsensical, words don't have one meaning, each word has its own meaning. The same is true of the question... What does life mean? The English used to pose the question is valid, but the combination of words rules out any single answer.
Furthermore, there's a difference being meaningless and worthless. Going back to the tree example, if a tree was worthless the environment it existed in would not be changed depending on whether it existed. However, we can see that the tree has an influence on the world around it.
I've stopped the tree example there, because there's one more point that must be addressed otherwise this conversation is unlikely to progress. Whilst the 'meaning of life' question does not make sense, the reasons for asking it do, and that is to work out what we should do with our life. Whilst I still maintain that 'life is what you make it', I think it'll be helpful to share a little of my personal story and philosophy.
In 2012, I tried out a religious retreat, and whilst the people there were well intentioned, I reacted badly to it, which resulted in quite a bit of soul searching. Something that helped me balance myself what the teachings of Socrates, in particular that he was the wisest man because he knew one thing... that he knew nothing. This helped me change my perspective on life... instead of reaching up for answers about higher purpose (that I could never claim knowledge of), I instead chose to embrace the life I can experience now. I find value in enjoying life and in being a positive influence in the life of others. Seems like a perfectly fine approach to me, and you see I didn't need to find a universal answer to the 'meaning of life' question to choose this path either, your path is up to you.
As for universal ideal, perhaps the Golden Rule will suffice?
Don't know why you were downvoted, so I voted you back up. It would be nice if HN users used the downvote button to indicate useless or offensive posts rather than something they personally disagree with (particularly on topics with a wide spectrum of opinions where one's opinion is closely tied to his identity).
Its not surprising that it depresses me. You say "choose the purpose for ourselves" but how can one be absolutely confident they are making the right choice? If they are not absolutely confident -- then why would they let the guiding principles of their entire life be something they're unsure of?
Should they simply do what makes them happiest? No, most people agree that doing what makes you happiest is not an answer for everyone. Some people like to murder, and as a society we agree thats not acceptable. Everyone would feel good taking heroin, but that wouldn't be good either. Also, simply striving for happiness is messy - when do you go for immediate gratification and when do you strive for long term happiness?
Should people's purpose be helping others? Maybe, but there are problems with that too. Mostly, when do you help others and when do you help yourself? Perhaps if you helped yourself just a little more you could help a lot more people. But if you help yourself you stop helping others...so the advice of "helping others" really isn't a complete thought/advice. (Though, I do agree I like to help others.)
Honestly I don't know how anyone can place any value on anything without a purpose for themselves, and while many people have assigned purposes for themselves, I'm curious how they came to the conclusion that that purpose was the right one. So many people base decisions on what others do, or what feels good...and not many people sit down and think through the logic of it, I think.
So, back to my point about not being surprised that it depressed me: without valuing anything, nothing feels good. Art is seen, understood, and neither liked nor disliked. Comedy is seen, comprehended, but not fulfilling. Physical rushes are felt, experienced, and let pass. There is nothing to base happiness on because nothing matters. That is, until a purpose is understood. Its the most important thing of all and so any time you take a step that supports it, you can give yourself a pat on the back for doing whats right. The purpose I understand is to discover a purpose. Every time you exercise so that you can think more clearly and live longer, every time you build something or accumulate wealth so that you can better yourself and put yourself in a better position to make life a little longer and promote research a little more, or even every time you relax you can actually relax because you know all these things will help you in the long run. Its a deep confidence in knowing that I'm doing as best I can because nobody knows the purpose, if there even is one, and so the only way we can have piece of mind that we haven't wasted the little time we have here is by doing as best we can to figure it out.
I think you are mixing some things together. For starters, you should distinguish between a "life's purpose" that you set for yourself, and one that you assume for other people. You can only decide for yourself, not for other people. You may wish other people had specific values, and try to enforce them with violence, but you can not decide for them.
Next, you should distinguish between a goal or purpose and the means to achieve it. If you goal is to achieve world peace, it doesn't imply that you know about a sure way to achieve it, and you don't have a guarantee that the steps you take are the right ones. That doesn't imply that it is useless to try, though.
Ultimately, what I find sad is that apparently you need some external validation for your existence. You can not stand on your own. It is as if you were missing a leg - that would be sad, no?
I am not sure how to describe it better. I think if you are feeling emptiness and can't appreciate things, very likely the reason is much more basic than "a general lack of meaning in life". Personally I think it is much more likely that the root cause are emotional problems in your life, loneliness, not getting along with family and friends and stuff like that.
The physical laws of the universe iterated for a long time to produce a way to know itself: the individual conscious being. The individual conscious being is the only part of the universe capable of exerting control over itself, and thus the singly most powerful object in the universe is you, except for the competition and collaboration of your fellow conscious beings. Your local basis for value is what is good for you vs bad for you. Abstract this to the basis for value to all individual conscious beings and you can see why preventing others from doing what is best for them by using force is bad. Not only would it trigger others to try to protect themselves by harming you, but it would also remove the benefits of collaboration.
My great fear is our brains (both individually and collectively) are simply unable to comprehend the universe in its true fashion....just like my cat cannot comprehend how a door opens by pushing on it.
There's a qualitative difference between our brain and cat's brain. We can do abstract reasoning, and with it we can "close over" ourselves and talk about how to improve. If we reach the point when we realize our brains are "unable to comprehend the universe" (and won't blow ourselves up before), we'll redesign our brains.
Life has no purpose. It's just applied randomness, like everything else. This is difficult for the non-religious to swallow, that's why religion exists.
HN isn't a support network but I fully understand and appreciate your post.
If there is no God, then our lives are even more important, because those things we value as humans--like love, friendship, kindness, happiness, curiosity, and humor--only exist because we're here to value them. As Harry James Potter-Evens-Verres put it:
"There is no justice in the laws of Nature, Headmaster, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!"
Have you ever considered why you value what you do? You can't have a rational conversation and say doing whatever you value is justified by the act of valuing it.
Following your hypothesis, it's impossible to have a rational conversation about anything. Look at solipsism for goodness sake. We can't even know that anything outside our own mind really exists.
If someone chooses to define a purpose for their life, then can be perfectly rational in doing so. Inasmuch as we accept that there is a reality (which we can't definitely prove btw), we can accept any number of truths based on our experience in that reality.
You can have a rational conversation about anything as long as you don't use irrational arguments.
Solipsism proposes that the world is just a creation of the mind.
However the only way to define the mind is in the context of the world outside of it.
So no, the world isn't just imagination, and the imagination isn't just an artefact of the world. You can only define each one of them in function of the other.
Just like you can't define good without bad.
No one I know has been able to define a rational purpose for their life. You can't have purpose to yourself, just to others. Either way it's an infinite purpose chain.
Find me anything in our universe that isn't, in effet, an infinite chain of purpose (or cause, if you will).
Just because the "purpose" of the cosmos is irreconcilable with the purpose that one being defines for themselves, doesn't mean that purpose is nonsensical.
I use the word nonsensical over the word irrational, because there are many things in the world which you would term irrational. One of them is the emergence of intelligence (yes, you can rationalize this as an evolutionary adaption, but the basis of everything is irrational, so who cares?). Irrational though it is, we are still, to some extent, rational minds trapped in this irrational world. To dispose of any presupposition as irrational, simply for the sake of logical consistency, is an irresponsible way to live.
It is neither rational nor irrational to live as a solipsist. It is simply an axiom on which you base the rest of your rationalizations. Choose your axioms wisely, and the world will unfold accordingly.
I think you mean't "To dispose of any presupposition as irrational, simply for the sake of logical consistency, is an responsible way to live." Not to, is irresponsible.
I like Viktor Frankl's solution to this apparent conundrum: the purpose of life is to find a purpose.
If you haven't read his book, I would highly suggest it. It's called "Man's search for meaning". He was a holocaust survivor, suffering through perhaps the most pointless of tortures, and he developed a philosophy that not only brought him through the situation, but has touched millions of lives sense then. I've never known a prominent motivational speaker/life coach/happiness expert who hasn't read this book.
If life doesn't seem to have a purpose, it's because you haven't created one.
Thanks for posting this. That phrase is the conclusion I came to in the parent comment of this chain. I have not heard that phrase elsewhere though. I wonder if he means it in the same way as I do? I'll have to check out his book.
His whole point is that there is no conclusive evidence that there is no purpose to life, and there will never be if there is none to be found, and that is precisely why the only way to find one is to keep looking for it.
Specific religions as we know them have nothing to do with this. Indeed, even he said he had logically convinced himself there is no God. It doesn't all have to be about God-in-a-book.
What would it even mean? What if the purpose of life is to build as many feeling entities as possible and kill them all at once in a slow and torturous way, so as to maximize the amount of pain that can be dealt in a single moment?
What I mean by that example: even if life had some purpose (for whom, set by what?), why should it be a purpose you agree with? Why would some external purpose override your own values?
If the purpose of life is to "build as many feeling entities..." then that is what should be done. You see, it is the way that we arrive at our understanding of the purpose that convinces us that it is right. By using the scientific method we can feel confident that we have discovered truth. Science provides us with evidence for why we should believe things and when we have evidence we have two options: we can either be rational and change our beliefs based on evidence, or be irrational and ignore the evidence. The type of "purpose of life" that I'm talking about would only be discoverable by intense scientific activity. It would be like the laws of physics: so undeniably true that you'd be a fool to not believe them. That said, I think your postulated "build as many feeling..." purpose of life is particularly unlikely. However, because no one has ever seen the purpose of life before, we must be careful to not rule out things prematurely, no matter how absurd they seem. I imagine most people of Darwin's time were so set on the idea of creationism that evolution was inconceivable, thankfully Darwin saw through that.
This is the first time I've publicly posted about this, and I'm glad to see that someone (you!) understands it. You're comment is spot on. I'll add a bit:
Venus says life has no purpose. After venus makes that statement, what does venus do next? Lets say it is some action, X. Why did venus do X? Well, because of Y1 (Y1 could be 'to sustain living' or 'to be happy' or 'to help others'). Ok, but why is Y1 important? Because of Y2. Ok, why is Y2 important? Because of Y3. And why is Y3 important? And so on and so on...and eventually there is no answer because venus believes life has no purpose. Any action venus takes, at its core, is illogical without a purpose.
So that is why I am saying that I was depressed: everything I did was meaningless, I had no idea what I should be doing. Then I realized the most important thing I could be doing was figuring out the most important thing I could be doing. If it turns out that venus is right, and there isn't a "most important thing I could be doing" then the fact that I wasn't doing "the optimal thing" doesn't matter because there isn't an optimal thing to be doing and I can be confident that I gave it my best shot.
Firstly, thank you for talking about it - I do not mean to argue with you about your own thoughts. But I think differently.
When I said life has no purpose, I didn't mean it was futile or nihilist or anything else. I mean that words like "purpose" simply do not apply. Purpose is an anthropological term and is meaningless in this context. To what "purpose" do mountains rise, volcanoes erupt, meteors explode in the sky? It is inappropriate to try to find purpose in these things. Purpose is a human concept.
This applies to life too. We are here because we, by whatever crazy turns of chance and happenstance, are here. There is no other answer; indeed that is not even one. We may be wiped out by a meteor tomorrow and the universe cares not one whit.
Why, you ask? Who on earth are you asking? There is no "why". Why did the coin come up heads or tails? Why does someone live and someone else die in an automobile accident? Why is that rock here, and not over there? There is no "why". For there to be a reason, someone needs to have thought about it, and there is no someone. There are causes and effects, yes, but no "why".
So what do we do next? We do what we are programmed to do, after thousands of generations of trial and error - we love one another, treat each other with kindness, some of us screw up, but mostly we try to pull together to improve our world and the lives of the people we love. Because that is all we are, animals with organic computers for brains and this is the program we are running, and there's no "why" for that, either.
These types of responses always reek of the need to be right (thus claiming very important Internet Points). Or, closer to home: "I've given up looking, and so should you."
Purpose is essential. You can cut it out, claiming you're somehow above it all, but you're cheating yourself, ultimately.
There are depressingly few subjects in the world amenable to anything like what the mathematicians would call "proof".
I have no "proof" of anything philosophical. No-one does. But in my experience, laymen banging on about "proof" are likely doing so in defense of some ludicrous belief whose nonsensical tenets they loudly invite all comers to "disprove" - an impossible task. Let's hope you're not one of them.
I can prove you have no purpose to yourself.
If you say you have purpose to yourself, you then ask: but then what's the purpose of myself? You enter infinite recursion.
You can only have purpose to others.
Life can only have purpose to something else other than life.
Does that other thing matter?
> Life has no purpose. It's just applied randomness, like everything else.
What makes you so sure of yourself? Smarter people than you have both believed and not believed in a greater purpose or in God. It's something that's been debated since man has existed, yet you seem unusually... certain... that you are correct.
> This is difficult for the non-religious to swallow, that's why religion exists.
If every human's behaviors and motivations were so simple as to be summarily condensed into one sentence like this, things like depression and suicide would also be easily assessable.
EDIT: In what strange circumstances is a post that says "Life has no purpose" upvoted, and mine -- that says "How can you be so sure of yourself?" -- downvoted?
I'm sure smarter men than myself believed the world is flat, or that leeching drained bad humours, lacking as they did proper knowledge or even a proper way of reasoning. But we do not lack for these things today.
The reason I sound sure of myself is because all of supernatural religion is impossible. It is all impossible. It is against every single thing we understand about the physical universe and, should evidence emerge confirming any of it, all we knew should be upturned - but that has not and will not happen because there is no evidence whatsoever. What would you do with a theory in total conflict with every other (working!) theory you have, and with absolutely no evidence in its favour?
Show me any evidence, at all, that any of it is even remotely possible, at all, and I'll promptly eat my hat, your hat, any other hats around, and join you at the altar. Until then, it's nothing but a bunch of ludicrous superstition.
This won't convince you (and in fact I never try to convince anyone), but if you're curious where someone with a scientific mind who also believes in God is coming from, perhaps this can at least give you a little insight into why we think what we do. I wrote this a few days ago:
Bullshit. We don't know how long life lasts, nor whether supernatural purposes or intentful[0] beings exist, nor what (if anything) is after. That does not mean there is "no purpose" to it. It is its own purpose.
Personally, I am most in line with Buddhism and think reincarnation is likely, and that mind (consciousness) itself is a first-class citizen, but existence doesn't have to be eternal to be meaningful. In fact, if a finite existence were meaningless, then an eternal one would be meaningless and infinite, which would be far more undesirable than death.
[0] "Intentful" is not a dictionary word, but nothing else captures what I am trying to say so I am justified in making a word up.
I agree with many parts of Buddhism but sorry pal, reincarnation (and heaven/hell) is totally BS. You have been cheated and ask yourself a question? Do you remember what happened before your present life? No? Then how come what you do now effects your "future" life that doesn't even care about your present life. Reincarnation is unfalsifiable(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability), which means it is as believable as the Flying Spaghetti Monster(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_monster) And you could also ask how you are even reincarnated to a human when the probability of being a virus/bacteria is several magnitudes larger? Accept life does not have a purpose, and all that exists are patterns, consciousness itself is only a complicated pattern.
Do you remember what happened before your present life? No?
Not in this state. The forms we take are conditioned by our karma. One aspect of the human form in this world is the inability to remember previous lives until extremely high spiritual states are attained, and even that latter bit is questioned by some.
The karmic effects and impulses continue on, invisibly. The memories (and much of the personality) die with the body. This is not a satisfying answer to some, but it's the most realistic.
And you could also ask how you are even reincarnated to a human when the probability of being a virus/bacteria is several magnitudes larger?
That discussion could go on for days: which lifeforms are sentient and which not, whether human birth makes future human birth more likely, etc. For sure: human birth is rare. Buddha compared it to an ocean with a wooden ring on it, with a turtle who rises to the surface once every 100 years. Human birth is as rare as that turtle surfacing inside that ring.
Thank you for your candidness. I hope you discover your true purpose one day. I suspect it is the net result of digging for it for decades, and that it is one of the most important aspects of our life. All the shit (I rarely curse, but it is apropos here) people obsess about - money, power, fame - is but a pale shadow next to the feeling of working toward one's purpose.
I have only a faint idea of mine, and it involves helping people and probably making things.
Atheism should not depress you, some religions are atheistic like Buddhism. If you don't see a reason or purpose for life, then make some for yourself. Don't let evil people win who push you towards suicide. I know the feeling I've been bullied and abused by people who told me to kill myself. But I refuse to let them get to me anymore.
At least live for friends and family members who care about you and want you to live. That has to be some sort of rational reason to live right there. If not then find a irrational one like live to see what is new in comic books, movies, TV shows, technology, science, medicine, etc. Just live to see the new stuff come out and enjoy it. Some people live with no known reason or purpose to live, they live because they are alive.
You define your own meaning to life, don't let others force theirs on you. That is your rational reason and rational purpose to live, to find meaning in life. See you are on a quest to learn that, so live it the best way you can without harming others.
Your journey sounds somewhat like mine. Reading too much of Albert Camus and HP Lovecraft didn't help in looking to the bright side of things. Two key findings for me: 1-I am here to help making a better next batch 2-I am one of the myriad of consciences that the universes uses to watch itself and understand. So it is pretty much normal that there are tons of weird unknowns and unsettling things going on. No need to commit suicide just because I see no meaning in all of that. Note: It was close for me to just go away from my own hand, I was hit twice by a car, and about died from peritonitis.
I am also glad that everything works out for you. I have recently read a story posted on my university (UBC)'s compliment facebook page. I think it is very similar to your own story. I want to share it with you and all the people on HN. I hope this story could inspire all of you the way it has inspired me.
I really like your thought, that "The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life". I'm not atheist, although not very religious too and I'm not person who feel any happiness, really until now I can't define what happiness is, if happiness is about money, relationship, social interaction, belongings, success, etc. I will disagree with it, I can feel 'happy' when I'm read some papers, re-proving theorem or coding. I don't know if this kind of 'happy' really a happiness or just my brain that make this things a happiness.
I think this is a good question. My first conclusion I drew as an undergrad was that since I cannot currently grasp the purpose, I need to put myself in a position where that would be more likely. My grades went from just barely passing to near 4.0. I knew I needed to do well in school so that I could learn more, so that I can be more valuable to others, so that I may obtain more wealth and influence, so that I can have the ability to do more things...and perhaps one of those things would be discovering the purpose.
Since no one before has ever extracted the purpose from the fabric of the universe, I knew I needed to be able to do things that none, or very few, have been able to do. I decided I cannot lead an average life. Even if the average life of an American in the 2000s offers much more than an average life even 100 years ago, my rough estimations suggest that this still isn't enough to find the purpose.
I also went about abolishing my depression. Depression served no purpose other than to limit me by sapping energy, making me disinterested in things, and disinterested in people. I forced myself to find meaning in things based on what they meant to my new ultimate goal, that is, discovering the ultimate goal. With a goal in mind that I actually believed in, I could feel happiness and accomplishment every time I took a step towards it. The depression ended.
I studied what it is that makes people successful. It appears to me that being valuable to other people is central. Luckily I'm already fairly smart, because large scale success (as opposed to just being successful in your social group) implies a higher bar of ability since your social group is now "the world". Being smart is good, but isn't quite valuable to other people in a large way. So, I'm developing tools to help people improve their lives and simultaneously aim to elevate myself by elevating other people.
The final piece I feel I should share is that eventually, my ability to search for the purpose will run out. Specifically, I mean death. However, unlike previous generations, my generation has the luxury of believing (through medicine and technology) that there is a small probability that we can escape death far longer than those who've lived before us. I am torn about how to approach this. Should I drop everything and go study medicine and be a direct contributing factor to possibly escaping death, or should I gain wealth and influence and promote research through those means? I have decided on the latter for now. It is a bet, and its one I'm unsure of. In the end, though, if it becomes clear I'm on the verge of death... I can at least have piece of mind that I did as best I could and have no regrets for the way I spent my life.
Either there is a purpose or there isn't, and I will find it or I won't. If there is a purpose and I find it, win. If there isn't a purpose and I don't find it, then things like 'win' and 'lose' don't make sense because there is no way to be doing the right or wrong thing without some purpose to judge it against. If there isn't a purpose and I do find it -- thats not possible. If there is a purpose and I don't find it then, while perhaps its sad that I missed out on discovering it, I can rest assured that I've done everything in my ability to discover it, and hold no blame on myself for not living more optimally / doing the right thing.
The story goes like this... In senior year of high school I 'formalized' my atheism. I'll save those details for another day, however, it suffices to say that I was confident that I was drawing the correct conclusion about the nonexistence of god. In thinking about the implications of a godless universe I realized the vastness of time, the insignificance of myself, and how nothing actually mattered. There is (or so I thought) no reason to do anything at all because its all going to be washed away in time. My drive to carry on vanished. Everything was futile, hopeless. Nothing I did mattered so why do anything at all -- why feel happy about anything at all?
I constantly thought of suicide. The ways I'd do it, the statements I'd try to make with it. It was an awful time, and it was all right in the middle of my undergraduate college experience. This continued on for a couple years as I tried as best I could with school while investigating how other people are able to cope with the magnitude of this concept. The reality I found was that most people don't cope with it, or rather, they cope with it by never even considering it. That only made things worse of course, everyone I'd talk to about this had almost nothing to say.
One day I decided I'd actually go through with it. As I lay on my bed I thought to myself "Alright, its been long enough. I've felt terrible and thought of suicide for years now. Either I'm going to man up and get this over with, or I'm just going to keep dreaming of doing it every day." So I bullied myself into finally committing to finish it, and there was a sense of relief. I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner. That was when I made the most fantastic discovery of my entire life, but first, some other things you should know.
During this time I was also struggling with being gay and, as a gay computer scientist myself, I found Alan Turing very interesting. It struck me as awful that he died in 1954, not long before The Beatles, free love, and the full onset of the civil rights movement. Just a few more years and he could have lived in, and possibly even helped to shape, a much more liberal society.
When I asked myself why I hadn't decided to do it sooner, I realized it was because I was never sure. I always hoped that I would find some clue that would change my mind. So I thought to myself: am I sure now? Do I have conclusive evidence that killing myself is the right thing to do? Am I certain there won't be some dramatic unforeseen shift in circumstances that would improve my life and make me not want to kill myself (like Turing missed out on)? No, I was not absolutely certain that life had no meaning.
We know so little of the universe and theres no way that any of us can be absolutely certain that suicide is the best choice without research that would take hundreds of years in understanding physics, the mind, and probably fields that don't even exist yet. Its possible that life does indeed have a purpose and we simply don't know it. The optimal thing to do is to continue on and do as best we can to discover this purpose -- because if there is a purpose, then actively looking for it is the smart way to find it. If there isn't a purpose, then the time we 'wasted' in search of a purpose wasn't really wasted after all because theres no way to judge whether it was time well spent without an ultimate purpose.
Getting back to the discovery... Probably mere hours away from killing myself, I realized that there was no way to know if killing myself was the right thing to do. There may be something to live for that I don't know about -- some overarching infallible truth embedded in the fabric of the universe that gives life meaning. This was a powerful idea: I should not kill myself because there may be a purpose of life. Now I decided to not kill myself...but what should I do next? I had no plans; after all, I had expected to be dead later that day. Well, it was simple. Nothing mattered except the thing that had kept me alive: the potential for a purpose of life.
I realized that every bit of my life should be based on discovering the purpose that may be embedded in the universe. The most important thing, the driving factor in all aspects of my life, indeed my very own reason for existence and purpose of life was to discover the purpose of life. "The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life." It is beautiful.
There are many questions and implications that come from realizing this purpose of being alive but for now this comment is long enough. If you're interested in hearing more, let me know. I've thought a lot about this and (in true HN fashion) am building some tools which use ideas that stem from this one. I hope that my story of how I walked right up to the precipice of death and decided to turn back to life helps anyone who is also struggling with such issues.