i think this is one of the questions that is often asked: “What is my purpose?” “What is the meaning of all this?” “Why are we here?”. And my answer might not be one that you like, because of the way you have been taught while growing up.
We live in a world where words like “purpose” and “meaning” are thrown around like achievement of it would be the Holy Grail, and it puts people on a frantic search, but it’s not true. How can you not see it when you look at the world around you?
Do trees have a purpose or a meaning? Yes, they support life, but is that their purpose? Is that what they are here for? Are they here for anything at all other than being and enjoying the wind, and the occasional dogs taking a piss on their roots?
Do lions, tigers, and wolves have a purpose? Yes, they balance out the ecosystem but is that their purpose? Are they here for anything at all, other than seeing the sun, hunting prey, and enjoying their moments with their families, and the occasional human friends they make that give them belly scratches and stroke their fur?
You see i believe this search for purpose and meaning, is rooted in the fact that we live in an unnatural society. i know the word doesn’t sound great – “unnatural” but it is how it is, we don’t take inspiration from nature in the way we lead our lives. (notice i didn’t say: we don’t “follow” nature) because nature is not something that needs to be followed in my opinion, but like everything around us, used as something to draw inspiration from, and make our lives better.
i have kept trying to do some things. i have knocked on doors, the doors of the people that have what i need, that they could give it without breaking a sweat, and without it being a stress on their lives. i have asked, because although we live in a world of taking, i believe asking is the right way to go, at least for me, even if that means i don’t get to accomplish my work. Even if that means the world doesn’t get to see a different way of doing things, so i guess in a way the current lifestyle is deserved.
As a reminder, the current lifestyle is that you are born, for whatever reasons, often the reasons are that “time is ticking, you need to make babies”, then by the way society is modeled, parents need to go to work, so you need to go to kindergarten and spend the majority of the day without your family, then you go to school, and then to university, then find a job, to make money to be able to survive, and then you work for 40 years, sometimes doing what you love, other times doing what you need to do in order to survive, and then you retire and chill when you’re old, and then you die. And that was it. The grand life of a slave, because it is a society of modern slavery regardless of how “free” and how much “opportunity” you have.
Yes you are “free” – but you are free to choose from the options that will lead you onto the same path of work until you die, doing what you may or may not like.
Yes, you have “opportunity” for education – but it’s education that educates you on the same topics that lead you to the same path, doing the same work that you may like or that you just need to do in order to survive.
The reason for the existence for this article is that i have children, and i know they haven’t chosen to be here. And i think of the world i am putting them in. i think that i am participating in this process of turning them into cog wheels of a broken system. Is that how you fix a broken system? By adding more cogs and wheels and components and making it even more complex, or you address the issues that make it broken in the first place and build on top of that?
My answer for all this is that purpose, meaning are things that require something to follow. i guess sometimes we like to turn off our brains and just do what we are told, but maybe that’s cool only for a little while, because extending this over a lifetime, it becomes a burden. Maybe it’s a rhythmic dance of following-leading where we all need to figure out when we can take a step back, and then to know for certain when we should put ourselves forward, and in such a system, putting ourselves forward would be supported by the people who are taking a step back at that time. Like water, like waves.
Maybe we should try to be a little bit more like water.