Purpose is really just actualised meaning and just like meaning there is no purpose in life other than that which we make. The reason that most people are looking for meaning or validation and something, anything at all to provide a goal or trajectory around and as which they might wrap their aspirations and goals is that there is none. We seek meaning and purpose in ideas, ideologies, cultural cliques, constructive (or self-destructive) assertions of self-definition and behavioural or cognitive pattern and experience because there is none.
Someone might argue that this search for purpose and meaning precisely is the purpose and meaning of life and to be honest I am certain that there is any point or value to be obtained from challenging this position. We inhabit an expanding space and yawning void that opens up here between experience and the symbolic abstractions of goals that we must cultivate or adopt from prefabricated bundles of words and ideas which came before us.
There really is no purpose in life beyond that which we make and all of this human angst and anxiety is really just so much hot air and bluster. In a thousand years, none of us will be here; in a billion – no traces of any of this life we cherish will remain. Make your meanings, seek your purposes but know that they are always only ever as transient as we are so don’t get too hung up on them. This, too, shall pass.
Daedelus Kite 
2 replies on “Purpose in Life”
What about spirituality, do we have a misson here?
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Missions, purposes, goals… if spirit and spirituality is anything at all, it is that absence of form or purpose and directed, known truth or fact that surrounds us, infuses us, envelops us.
Spiritual purpose is (also and inevitably) indistinguishable from no purpose whatsoever; not merely because we are cast as soul-orphans into a world with which we must endeavour in a few short years to render meaning and purpose that might (hopefully) outlast this transient material vessel of our body and brain, but because it is of the essential character and nature of spiritual experience or any other visceral inhabitation of the infinite that we can not, never, ever pin it down or define it, identify it directly or unambiguously and comprehensively reference or record it.
Spiritual purpose is indistinguishable from no purpose because it also manifests as nothing, emptiness, void. It is not nothing, it is indistinguishable from nothing and so, too, is peace, unity and love. It is of an alternative logic and a subtle point.
The original post was written in a darker emotional moment but my assertions here on spiritual purpose stand – we must interpret that purpose for ourselves because if anything at all is true, it is that those who claim and bloviate intimate knowledge of spiritual (or ethical) guidance – they know even less than nothing, in this sense and context. 🙂
The difference is between a void without purpose and one full of potential. It is theological, apophatic, but it is also practical…
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