I asked friends, family, and an increasingly broad number of people what they thought life was and why they were here. They answered, some more enthusiastically than others. Everyone had an answer of some sort, but many hesitated and even crumbled when I asked for clarification. I wasn’t confrontational or contrary, just seeking inspiration.
The fact that neither me, nor anyone around me, can definitively say where we are, means, by definition, that we’re all lost. Regardless of our outward accomplishments, without an understanding of life itself — the very wrapper of our existence — we’re operating without context. And yet despite that, we keep doing everything other than trying to find that context.
If we don’t even know where and what life is, what does that say about our professed “purpose”? This wasn’t a serious dilemma for anyone I spoke to. They certainly aren’t going to stay awake at night, or change what they do the next day. In their perspective, they all have jobs, hobbies, friends, responsibilities, and life goals which fill the need for context and purpose just fine. They have a worldview where they fit in. They could see the missing piece of the puzzle, but it wasn’t anything more than a mid-day philosophical exercise founded on a technicality.
But for me, the admission that I’m lost moved me deeply. If I’m lost, what have I been doing? What am I supposed to do? How do I get out of here? And if I’ve been operating under the assumption that I have a purpose, but I don’t even know what life is, then what is that purpose actually anchored to? If I really believed that I was lost, then I would act like a lost person. And lost people ask questions, search for familiar landmarks, and draw maps to get un-lost. They examine and re-examine their assumptions.
In realizing that I was lost, the first thing I wanted to do was re-examine everything I thought I knew. Conceptually, I should first know where I am. Once I know that, then I should start forming a set of beliefs based on those convictions. Then I should form values based on what I think is important. And from all of this I could develop an informed purpose. I’ve done none of that in my life. Instead, I’ve assembled a hodge-podge mixture of half-ass ideas that seemed right, felt good, and fit a predictable narrative I had playing in my ear at the time. I’ve dug deeper in some areas, while completely neglecting others. It’s a house of cards, and I’ve spent my whole life doing things without really knowing why.
We aren’t meant to live without purpose. And we cannot live with purpose unless we know where we are. I only know my experience, but I believe there are many who know that something fundamental is missing in our lives. We lack a framework which describes how we feel, and the time to put life on trial and mold those feelings into a functional worldview.
I write this so that I can figure out where I am and what I’m doing here so I might live my remaining years meaningfully. I doubt there’s a single original idea or thought in this work and with some effort, I could probably trace everything I write herein to something previously said. So why write at all? Because nothing I’ve read answers the questions that I specifically have, or puts them into the context of my life.
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