Thinking Alive

Purpose of Life

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 by Brian

0 A few years ago I spent a while trying to grasp “what it’s all about.” What I came up with — more or less — is that the purpose of life is to tell a good story. Whether or not that’s true, it’s the most effective way to manage and resolve a lot of problems.

0 Some people are drawn to the amusing and irreverent; some are drawn to stories about adventure and accomplishment — competitive victories and feats of ingenuity or perseverance — and some are drawn to stories about love, relationships, and unity.

0 Whatever you’re drawn to, regardless of what you believe, all the other purposes in life — happiness, utility, love, success, discovery, survival, procreation… are just special kinds of stories.

0 Even more broadly, unlike other suggested purposes which may or may not occur, stories must occur. There is no way to get out of story mode, even if we wanted to — unlike, say, happiness or utility which are sometimes available and other times apparently not.

0 Stuff is always happening. You won’t find anything that doesn’t happen. Even if you claimed to find something that doesn’t happen, you’d be mistaken. If something doesn’t happen then it can’t happen to you — and it certainly can’t happen in your story.

0 So story is the purpose of life while happiness etc are purposes in life: other purposes are present but not all-encompassing.

0 But then what do we aim for? If stories are inevitable, what’s the point of trying? Aren’t purposes supposed to be motivational?

0 Of course, we’re still free to enjoy and make use of all the diverse purposes in life, so you can still go ahead and aim for a great career and a family with the man or woman of your dreams (or to cure cancer or serve God or visit every country in the world or even stay at home eating cheeseburgers every day) but the story-purpose grounds them all, puts them all in the same light.

0 Beyond that, some stories are better than others. Our aim should be for good stories — or better stories… But who’s to decide what’s a good story?

0 It’s largely subjective. Much of it comes down to working out for ourselves what’s good and what’s bad, learning what’s good and bad through the course of our story.

0 There is an objective aspect as well. Some stories are more effective than others — which is to say, some stories are better at producing useful outcomes and positive effects, some stories are better for learning, relating, and re-creating — and in this way we’re saved from the despair of “agreeing to disagree.”

0 The outcome that matters most is the ability to make stories even better. In other words, when trying to decide how to approach things, we should ask, “Does this experience… not just make for a good story in itself — but does it help me develop into a better narrator?”

0 Of course we can never really know how generative our experiences will be until we actually go through with them — we might think something will be great but it turns out to be poor, or downright dangerous — so this might seem unhelpful. It’s something we might get wrong an awful lot before things start to go right…

0 But uncertainty isn’t something to avoid at all costs. Uncertainty, or at least dramatic tension, is an inherent element of life — and an essential quality of any good story.

0 After all, what good are a bunch of stories we already know the endings of?

Tags: generativity happiness utilitarianism, life, meaning, narrative, philosophy, purpose, purpose of life, stories, storytelling

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