Ask a dog and he will tell you something completely different from what the hummingbird will tell you.
I believe purpose is an egoistic construct to which you can apply your own definition but you are asking for personal opinions and this is something I've quested after all my life.
I think the ultimate purpose is to seek that answer and refine it as you go.
One goes through life with a limited amount of time and resources and that makes it precious.
That which is precious ought not to be wasted and a thing worth doing is worth doing well.
So living well is paramount. You can turn to those philosophers who have been at the impetus of understanding for thousands of years...forgotten for a time, driven underground by those who'd rather it were otherwise and then reborn into understanding.
Epicurus believed that the pursuit of happiness included making those around you happy.
Part of living well is understanding things like morality.
Humans are story-tellers and the best stories inform.
The same basic dynamics of power, good and evil, wisdom and mercy and generosity and helping the weak or exploiting the weak are elements that pre-date human existence and permeate our stories from Greece to Shakespeare to Jefferson.
Moral decision-making isn't a fool's errand though it might seem so in a highly corrupted environment.
Walter White (Breaking Bad) changed his moral code as did Jean Valjean (Les Miserables) because of downward pressures from a corrupt environment.
In the United States, we are living in a gilded age, of wealth disparity and it is a financialized economy which is cannibalistic. A predatory, imbalanced health care system was the impetus that led Walter White to see the ambiguous irony of those chemicals that are illegal or legal and go underground. When the rules aren't fair, why follow them? It is more moral to resist. Again, governed by a health care industry that is more predatory, particularly the pharmaceutical industry, than well-reasoned or just.
When the rule-makers are corrupt, the public oftentimes is forced into breaking the rules.
That is what happened to Jean Valjean. He stole bread and spent his entire life on a trajectory of exploring his purpose.
In Game of Thrones there is a large interplay of the powerful, the cruel, the naive, the just. To read about the choices made by rulers and individuals helps us find our way as individuals and groups.
My great grandmother believed in astrology and predicted I would be an artist. I didn't know this until I heard it, decades after I'd fulfilled her prophecy and no longer believed in astrology. Which is one of those funny ironies one embraces when weighing truth. Was she right or was she in some way, the cause? And did it matter?
Her daughter-in-law, my paternal grandmother also was an artist and gave me my first set of oil paints. My parents also seemed to guide me like an invisible hand in this direction.
When you spend your whole childhood believing you're a pretty good "drawer" you play at it, joyfully and the practice of painting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then, winning an award at age six in a competition that was city-wide, my impression of my purpose was reinforced.
It wasn't until I was in high school that I realized my whole purpose might have been formed out of self-deception rather than my own free will. I decided to become a French teacher.
That didn't work out. When I was studying French in France one summer, I realized that all the Europeans studying there, as well, had a huge head start. I also learned that schools were slowly eliminating their foreign language classes.
I went back to art but with an appreciation for a language that influenced my first. There are expressions and words in French I adore. J'adore! Telling a child to be good in French is to tell a child to be wise!
I found that making art was a means of contemplation and comprehension to describe things with pencil or ink on paper or oil on wood.
And it was my show-and-tell purpose to share with others what I was finding out. (Some of us are extroverts. Some of us are intuitive. Some of us prefer the making to the end result.)
I liked the way stories can glance off images and leave a glimmer.
I included in my work all my other passions...for the natural world, for gardens for natural history, a sense of wonder and science and the magic within the real. I included what I was learning about how our minds work and about religions and morality. But mostly my purpose was to listen and wait for the work of art to dictate to me.
As a short person, (5 ft 2), I embraced the irony of size...flies that eat frogs and pygmy elephants and giant, man-sized flowers. (Pictured above is The Amorphophallus titanum and Pygmy Elephants.)
I've made mistakes and bumped into problems along the way. But I've learned that most mistakes have the potential to lead to something better so by taking the right kind of risks you are inviting mistakes to give you greater insight. One hopes to be elastic and see error as a means of discovery and improvement.
"It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live life so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all----in which case, you fail by default."
"It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth"
Finding the core truths in reality, especially when they are counter-intuitive or ironic...when they challenge our self-serving parochial presuppositions and embracing them is a way of honoring our big brains.
Finding that within those core truths exists a moral foundation that is not, in fact foolish, as some would have it. Not naive or a means to victimization but it is the beautiful music of good self-governance and a way of honoring our big hearts. There is joy in that as wel
-- Mon Sep 21, 2020 7:07 am --
I don't use quite that phrase: "the purpose of life", because it implies something that I'm doubtful about -- the notion that life itself has some sort of goal or "perfect outcome" which we're supposed to discover and understand. I don't see how that could be true.
But I love "big questions"
This question can also be treated as a question about how one understands "meaningful living" as opposed to its opposite -- just existing or surviving until death takes one down.
I do draw a fairly sharp distinction between what's meaningful and meaningless in human terms: this distinction arises from my view of the difference between authentic being and inauthentic being. In short, meaningful existence is correlated with authentic being.
So what's authentic being? Well... that's where things get hairy. I can talk and talk and talk, and then at some point I have to stop talking, because the words themselves start to just add to the confusion without helping to express or clarify anything. So I talk about "wholeness" and "being the whole", which is contrasted with "fragmented being".
Our minds chop reality up into fragments -- conceptualizing everything, including "myself". As that process produces ever-greater complexity and detail, we start to lose the whole in all of the fragments. The analysis of ourselves and life obscures the underlying unity. Once we've thoroughly lost that unity, life becomes meaningless... we can't figure out who we are or what we should be doing or why we're here or what's good and what's bad. We've lost our selves, in short. We've traded being for knowledge, and now we're confused.
So I'm all about undoing that... being able to recover or relocate true being, with the implicit goal of "defragmenting" myself and life. The actions and experience and operations of true self are inherently meaningful, they have a wholeness and coherence about them which cannot be replicated by getting the "right philosophy" and trying to execute it.
In short, I can't explain what's meaningful in sufficient depth to be satisfactory -- but when I'm being myself, it flows naturally. When I'm not being myself, it's all dry philosophy or fragmented thinking.
