Meaning of life? Isn’t that about finding love? Or have children? Or to realize yourself? Or all at once? Hmm… let’s see!
With all love, ecstasy and joy – life can be pretty exhausting! This permanent metabolism, hunger, thirst, fatigue, hormone fluctuations, back pain, aging … phew! Then there are things like the pain of separation, pressure to perform, wanderlust, inner conflicts and insecurities that keep us awake at night and make us ponder the meaning of life … Mano man. And to top it all off, it currently looks like we humans are destroying the environment and the earth would be better off without us. No wonder that one or the other asks the question now and then: What is all this for…?
Purpose in Life: 11 Signs Yours Has One
First the good news: You don’t need to know the purpose of your life to live a meaningful and good life. For example, look at children, jellyfish or toadstools: They all live by themselves, undeterred and exactly as they should be, without being able to explain the meaning of their life to themselves or to you.
Sure, we’re neither children (except maybe at heart) nor jellyfish or toadstools, but that just means that our lives should look different than that of a child or a jellyfish if possible. After all, we have completely different possibilities and requirements. How should it look? If you can tick one or more of the following, something like yours!
- You get up (almost) every morning.
- you don’t want to die
- You see some things differently than your fellow human beings.
- When you are hungry, you eat (usually and when possible).
- There is or was at least one person who loves you.
- There is or was at least one person you love.
- You have at least one memory that makes you happy.
- You’ve had your heart broken before and you survived it.
- Sometimes you make gut decisions.
- You would like to experience something new.
- You would accept unpleasant changes in order to be able to continue living.
Purpose of life: what is it really about?
Does this mean that the question of the meaning of life has been answered? Nope! Probably not for most. Finally it falls z. For example, it is much easier to get through periods of separation or to endure a heavy loss when you know why.
However, this brings us to the bad news: in all the millennia in which people have thought about the meaning of life, no one has yet found an answer that made everyone clapping their hands and saying: “So! Did we finally get that sorted out?“So we better not get our hopes too high…
One of the problems with clarifying the meaning is that it is the question is not very clear:
- What is actually meaning? Is it the same as purpose? Or how meaning?
- What kind of life is meant anyway? Mine? Yours? That of an adult? Or life itself?
Luckily we don’t have to answer each of these individually, because we know our main intentions to deal with the meaning of life. We want to know …
- … how we should lead our life (so that it makes sense).
- … why we should persevere, even if everything is stupid.
The answers to that are very easy!
Purpose of Life: How do I live a meaningful life?
Some feel they have to do something great to have a particularly meaningful life, such as B. Thomas Edison, Nelson Mandela or Lady Gaga. But in truth there is none particularly meaningful life – every life lived is equally meaningful. When asked what a successful, meaningful life looks like, there cannot be one or a few, but only tens of billions of different correct (!) answers, for the following reason: The success story of life is based on diversity and individuality. Countless species with which we share our habitat have developed from the simplest single-celled organisms. Daisies, peat moss, octopus, lion, giraffe, bee, human. We have in common all areas of the earth filled with life: water, forest, desert, sky, glacier …
What’s in it for us? If our habitat z. B. suddenly drastically changed, we have a good chance that one or the other life form will be preserved – and life itself preserved.
What does that mean for our lives now? Very easily: The number one priority in life is obviously self-preservation or self-care. Whether a priority of this kind is now the same as meaning is debatable, but one thing is certain: if you are convinced by the success story of life and would like to be part of it, you should do it Make self-care a priority in your own life.
But that’s not all.
So that the concept of life really works, we as individuals have to live out our very special characteristics in the best possible way or as much as possible. Why? For example, if a gazelle behaved like a lion instead of a gazelle, it obviously wouldn’t be playing the game. If we, as humans, drifted like jellyfish in the sea, we would also be breaking the rules – and probably dying too. Exactly the same is true at the level of individuals, especially for us humans.
The peculiarity of man
As humans, we differ from many species in that, among other things, we more freedom and opportunities have. For example …
- we don’t necessarily all have to reproduce in order for our species to survive.
- we can move around, and thanks to cars, trains and the like, we can do it fairly quickly.
- we don’t have to make a lot of effort to supply our body with nutrients or to protect ourselves from the weather and seasons.
- we can plan our future and recall past experiences to inform present decisions.
All of this gives us a lot of time and energy to deal with other things like the meaning of life. Even if we sometimes find it exhausting and therefore cannot fall asleep: That’s part of being human.
Through these freedoms and possibilities man is a way of life with particularly stark differences in individual characteristics. Two lions may have different territories, families, hunting grounds, etc. Two people have different jobs, hobbies, habits, cooking skills, talents, ways of dealing with feelings, writings and and and. This is the very special feature of our species: Although we are all equally meaningful and valuable for the big picture, we are extremely different.
This results in what is probably the clearest instruction or task that life places on each of us: We should live how it feels right for us. After all, if you live the way others say or do, you don’t have to be present yourself – because THAT could be anyone, and maybe even a chimpanzee. (Not that we wanted to get at it, but by the way, striving for certain ideals of beauty or obsessively following every trend would probably be the most pointless thing we could do with ours …)
Purpose of Life: Why Persevere?
Viewed soberly, the task of self-care dictates that we persevere, even when things get uncomfortable – but unfortunately that’s not a particularly great motivation. But how about this: It’s guaranteed to go uphill again! The older we get and the more lows we survive, the more self-confident and stronger we master crises of meaning and life. On the one hand because we know that we can, on the other hand because our experiences have taught us that life can always turn around for the better. But then we are no longer at the meaning of life, but at the meaning of hope …