What do YOU believe is the purpose of life?

[OverlordMondo]

Okay, for serious now. Each person has their own purpose in life. There is no one purpose.

 

Someone said that we have the same purpose as animals, and on a baser level we do. But we also have more advanced thought. This leads to emotion. We have different emotions than animals, and they are more intense. No animal has ever questioned it's purpose in life. They've never questioned anything. If we don't satisfy these emotions, we become sidetracked by them, and can't complete the more standardized purposes like reproduction.

 

Long explanation:

 

A major difference between us and animals is agriculture. No other animal can plant and maintain their own source of food. When humans discovered agriculture so very long ago, we gained the ability to stop roaming the world, and settled down. We could focus on defense, rather than offense, as our food could no longer fight back, and was harder to deplete. When the addition of Division of Labor was added, we created specialists, who did their job faster and more efficiently than others. When they finish their work early, they get time.

 

Time can never be wasted. During that period, time was used to think. It was used to think of better ways to work, it was used to think of better ways to defend. Most importantly though, I believe it was used to question what should be done, rather than how to do what's already been done. The question of "purpose" has surfaced. People can now wonder what to do with their time.

 

There are many options concerning how to advance from this point. People will develop ideas that clash with others' ideas. When this happens, people think about how to make their idea dominant, which leads to even more options than before. After believing in one idea for a while, people will requestion ideas and purpose.

 

In the end there's this huge flow of purpose. Right and wrong are different to each group. And we faction ourselves off and band together to make our ideas dominant.

 

All that said, I guess the first purpose of life is to find your purpose. The second being to defend it. The third purpose is to carry out the purpose determined by the first purpose.

[Wizard]

Followed by 42.

[Gryph]

The purpose of life is to survive.

[Mr.X]

Even I was isolated, very old & bored, my main purpose would be to survive, respect myself & stay healthy.

[Weirdy]

and I just wanna be better than my parents

[KyokugenKiss]

the meaning of life is hidden in the number 7

[Sturmvogel]

There is no meaning of life in any spiritual sense or philosophical...it only has the meaning you give it.

Edited January 3, 2005 by Sturmvogel