A couple of weeks ago, a Sunday morning Quora question led me to think more of human life and its purpose.
Here is the question: What is the meaning of life? Does life have a purpose or not? If not, does that give us the chance to make up any purpose we choose?
This is my answer.
Human life can be compared to the universe. It has a random purposeless existence. It has no aim. It just exists, sometimes evolves, not at all in a hurry. There is no timeline. Mostly accidents than choices.
Humans are the only living beings who think about purpose in life. Rest of animals live in the present moment. They do not regret about past or hold anxieties about future. We think, read, watch and imagine. We build narratives in our mind. We create stories of how a meaningful life should be like. Actually, there is no meaning in life. It is mere biological existence. It has only one purpose, to transfer the genes to next generation. That way genes are selfish, they are using your body a medium to transfer genes. So we are transferring a set of genetic codes to a new life. Our purpose is over.
As we advanced our intellectual and spiritual capabilities of our brain, we succeeded in creating narratives about our higher self, positioning ourselves as a civilised being than animals.
Meaning of life is purely a narrative created by humans in last 10,000 years. Till then, there was only hunger, survival, fear, greed and sex. When we moved from a hunter-gatherer civilisation to an agrarian set up, we started getting time to think about tomorrow. Because harvests don’t happen every day, unlike hunting. So the concept of tomorrow began the movement called the meaning of life.
