What is the main purpose of life to you?

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It took me awhile to wrap my head around the logic of life’s purposelessness. Life only really has value if there’s no purpose in it. Evolution proceeds from having a single, unified purpose, survival, to being able to decide your own direction in many ways. You spend your whole life trying to get out of the cage of survival-thinking

Only to march right back in the direction of wanting another cage. Everybody wants purpose in their lives. I think it’s a false desire. If you really wanted purpose, there’s lots of ways to get it. You can join the military, or work in health care. These arenas have well-defined ways for you to spend your entire lives trying to solve problems that can’t be solved.

I’m not like that. I want my problems to be solvable. If my life had a purpose, I’d accomplish whatever it was and get back to screwing around. I am a giant hammer you can throw at problems and expect a resolution. Doesn’t matter what the problem is, I can come up with something.

For life to have purpose means you have more problems than you can ever solve. I don’t really want that, and I daresay that most people who say they want it don’t really want that either.

But it’s not like I don’t have such a source. I do. It’s called philosophy. There is an endless vein of philosophical problems to hack at solutions to. For example, what is love and how does one do it most effectively? Some people, like the preeminent Franklin Veaux, have come up with solutions that work for them, and that work well enough that they were able to abstract it out enough to share the lessons with others. I just bought his book so that I can digest his approach a bit more.

But what I’m after is answers to bigger questions, more abstract principles and ideas. Every problem I have is an opportunity to dive deeper into my philosophy. I try to identify and solve the philosophical problem before I solve the real problem. Because real problems don’t matter. There’s always going to be another one. Philosophy never exhausts.