Ultimate Purpose: A New Course of Action Part 1
Every day we are forced to make decisions. Getting up and eating is a decision; NOT getting up and eating is also a decision. Every way that every second of your life is spent reflects a decision. For many, these decisions have no apparent purpose; they never ask themselves “why am I doing this.” Even fewer take the answer to that question of why, and ask it why again. The result is that most people go through life acting to accomplish many purposes, most of which are unknown and unchosen by them. Many act to accomplish purposes that evolution has hardwired into their brains, such as having a lot of sex with many different people. Others act to achieve culturally determined goals, like earning as much money as possible.
This is not how I want to live my life. I want to have one guiding set of purposes that I have chosen and that I know explicitly. I then want to work to determine which actions best accomplish these purposes. Then, I want to do them. And so I will write my first post on my ultimate purpose, the fruit of many hours spent asking myself why, and then why again, and so on until I reached this answer.
My ultimate purpose is to increase my wellbeing and to live as long as possible so that I can continue to experience wellbeing.
Wellbeing is a general term that I use to encapsulate as best as I can the set of experiences that feel good. It’s a combination of the experience of pleasure, satisfaction, a lack of worry, a feeling of control, a feeling of empowerment and freedom from limitations, a feeling of connection to others, the opportunity to experience at times competition and triumph, an understanding of grief, pain, suffering, desire and other things that are generally not pleasant but yet add richness in small doses, the opportunity to be creative and many other experiences make up wellbeing.
This post is meant to serve as an introductory chapter to the idea of wellbeing. In further posts I plan to examine in MUCH further depth different states of wellbeing, different ways to accomplish wellbeing, the way probabilistic thinking is absolutely essential to assessing how much wellbeing different states cause and much more. For now, simply ask yourself whether you’d rather be reading this post right now, or whether you’d rather be being tortured and see how the two different states of being correspond to different levels of wellbeing (you’d rather be being tortured right now because it doesn’t feel as bad as reading this post… haha, I hope not).
Survival is the other goal because it seems unlikely that we will continue to be able to experience wellbeing after we are dead (though I have examined this issue in much depth and plan to eventually post a series of thoughts on the matter). Survival isn’t necessarily always desirable. For instance, if you know you are dying of cancer and will likely be dead after 12 hours of intense pain, you might decide that life offers you no further opportunities for wellbeing and decide to take a heavy dose of heroin and end your misery.
In subsequent posts, I plan to introduce different general actions people and humanity should take to best achieve the goals of wellbeing and survival for all.
A final note: I don’t like or believe in certainty; however, I believe very strongly in greater and lesser degrees of certainty. I’ve worded this post strongly because I believe strongly in the ideas here. However, I also have an ulterior motive of being provactive. I want you to be slightly irked at the presumptuousness of a college student claiming to have found the ultimate purpose of humanity and I want that to generate challenges and new ideas. What I DON’T want is for people to disregard the whole notion of an ultimate purpose as ridiculous (unless you’re really ready to back your ideas up), because I think that kind of thinking has lead humanity to act aimlessly. And when we’re talking the scale of humanity, aimless action means people suffer and people die. So please join me in this debate and let’s work to give humanity direction and chosen purpose.
4 Responses to “Ultimate Purpose: A New Course of Action Part 1”
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fritz misanthrope on February 12th, 2009
interesting premise, ultimate purpose.
i’d suppose if i had to have the same, mine is freedom and experience.
Jason on March 29th, 2009
I have to wonder about meaning. If for example, you found yourself in a position where wellbeing were no longer a possibility, such as in a concentration camp, how would you make it to the next day? Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor wrote a book called Man’s Search For Meaning, where he proposed an idea called “Logotherapy”. Basically, it is a lack of meaning that makes people sick, and caused people to give up on life. He suggested that one can find meaning in one’s work, in love for another, and in suffering. According to him, wellbeing comes after one finds meaning, not necessarily before. For me, I tend to agree. Wellbeing is worth little if I find myself without meaning. To have wellbeing without meaning seems a little too like Sisyphus.
Shane on March 30th, 2009
This blog is definitely incomplete. I think that the concern with presenting polished posts has kept 90% of my thoughts unpublished.
Wellbeing is a very complicated thing. There are simple and basic sources of wellbeing, which I talk about it my next post, like being satisfied and not being thirsty. However, there are other aspects that are very personal and very complicated, such as meaning.
This is an incomplete thought, but basically any experiential state which is more preferable than another is one of higher wellbeing. For example, all else being equal, I’d much rather feel like my life had meaning than not. And indeed, it could be that feeling that life had no meaning would prevent all other wellbeing (I’m sure that the different sources of wellbeing interact with one another) and thus feeling that life has no meaning would be the state of the lowest possible wellbeing.
If that’s the case (and, indeed, I think that meaning is crucial to wellbeing), then we should strive to structure society in a way that enables people to best find meaning and recognize the damage that’s done when we take that away. I could go on further with this, and perhaps that’ll be the topic of my next blog post… So much to flesh out!