What is the Point of Life?

I may as well get right to it. This blog is called “How to Live and Why,” so let’s talk about that. So do I have the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, not exactly, but I have come to some conclusions about what the point of life is that I have found useful. Perhaps you will too.

First came the questioning. Sometime in my early twenties, I realized I was a nihilist. I don’t mean that I started throwing rocks at cars and shouting “Life is meaningless!” I just mean that I followed a chain of reasoning that led me to the conclusion that nothing in the universe has inherent value. I had already known I was an atheist for some time, and without a god to say that something is inherently valuable, the only thing left to give something inherent value was the universe itself. But I don’t believe the universe values anything. The universe is inanimate. Now that’s all fine and dandy in terms of a logical conclusion, but it does tend to cause a bit of a psychological crisis.

If nothing has inherent value, then you can choose to value anything. In one sense, it’s an enormous freedom. But it’s an empty freedom. There’s not much satisfaction in being free to choose anything if nothing is better than anything else. It seems like the human psychology desperately wants a reason for the things it chooses. Choosing something completely arbitrarily does not feel satisfying at all. And valuing nothing at all isn’t really an option either. Your brain has evolved to try really hard to convince you to value certain things like eating food when you’re hungry, avoiding burning yourself, etc. So the result of realizing I was a nihilist was that I continued valuing basically the same things I had valued before, but now I felt a sense of conflict about it because I realized that I couldn’t justify my values to myself.

But I wasn’t valuing things arbitrarily, was I? Of course I did actually have reasons for valuing what I valued, it’s just that the reasons didn’t feel good enough. Whenever I tried to look deeply into why I valued the things I valued, I would ask myself a series of “why” questions, and I would always end up at the answer “Because it feels good.” And that did not feel like a satisfying answer. (And yes, I do see the irony in rejecting “because it feels good” as a good answer simply because it did not feel good).

Finally came the breakthrough. After presenting my dilemma to some friends of mine, they encouraged me to consider trying to accept “because it feels good” as a good enough reason. I struggled with this at first, but then I had a couple of realizations that really helped me. The first realization was that “Because it feels good” wasn’t really the final answer in most cases. Outside of some element of randomness, the reason for anything feeling good basically comes down to evolution. Humans are, just like every other animal on earth, doing the things we do because our brains have evolved to make us want to do them. Humans often like to think of ourselves as being fundamentally different from other animals because of the way we use reason, but we’re still driven by the same natural processes every other living thing is. Our reasoning abilities are themselves a product of evolution, and they only exist because they have helped us to survive and reproduce even better than we could without them. At this point you might have some questions like “But if the only reason we do anything is because of evolution, then why do people sometimes sacrifice themselves for the sake of others?”

This brings me to the second realization I had, which is that doing what feels good does not equal hedonism. Previously I had thought that if the only reason to do anything was because it felt good, then that meant that you should live as a hedonist, but that did not feel satisfying to me. I should have realized right away that the fact that a life of hedonism did not sound satisfying to me was itself telling me exactly where the flaw in my logic was! If your goal is to feel good, and hedonism doesn’t make you feel good, then you shouldn’t be a hedonist! Evolution has not resulted in a bunch of hedonists because it is to the benefit of our survival to value sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term gain. It may feel nice now to lounge in the sun, but it’s not going to be good for your survival if you keep lounging in the sun forever and not exerting yourself to find food. And it may be pleasurable now to take the bigger piece of food away from your friend, but it’s not going to benefit your survival in the long-run if you sow seeds of discontent among your tribe. That’s why the idea of hedonism didn't feel satisfying to me. Because evolution has made my brain resistant to the idea. Evolution has made my brain want to seek not just short-term pleasure, but a greater sense of life satisfaction.

Once I realized that, I realized that it was perfectly appropriate for me to make my life goal simply to have a sense of satisfaction about my life. I didn’t need a bigger purpose other than that one. But that of course leads to the question, “What will make me feel satisfied in my life?” That question is worth a post in and of itself, but I don’t want to completely leave you hanging. So here's a place to get started:

The question of what will make you feel satisified is basically a psychological question. And luckily, while our psychologies are each unique, they also share a lot in common. So learning about what tends to make people in general feel satisfied in their lives is a pretty good way of starting to figure out what will make you feel satisfied in your own life. Some commonalities seem to be having good relationships with other people, having some sense of control over your choices, and feeling like you’re contributing something to the people around you. Keep a look out for a future post going more in depth on this topic.