Asklemmy @lemmy.ml

2mo ago

What's your purpose of life?

97 comments

I don't know.
- It's to overcome challenges and become a better person. To not live like an animal, to have morals, strength of character, treat others well, help other people.
  Basically the opposite of what the TV and social media is telling us.
  
  Is it?

I'm just here to raise entropy.

To work for some asshole and make just enough money to get by.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch Or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.

To enjoy the world and minimize how much I prevent others from enjoying it as well.
- How do you do the first?
  
  Personally, I indulge my wanderlust and love of good food.

Help each other.
- Everyone is born evil, the purpose is to realise we're one. It's a long cycle and we've done well in the last 100 year vs 1000 years
  
  Hard disagree. I think we're born stupid, that's very different.
  Honestly, your comment sounds a lot like the "original sin" shit that the Christian church tries to push.

Nothing!

ideally producing scientific research and art but in practice I'm just trying to minimize my own suffering :/
- Pretty sure that's what everyone is doing. It helps to help others, where we can, in my experience. Focus on love, beauty, goodness. We can hyperfocus on the ugliness and easily fall into the abyss of despair, rather than the abyss of freedom (within personal constraints, obvs).

To end it peacefully

My purpose in life is to produce poop and pee. I work hard so that I can afford food and water so that I can eventually poo and pee. I have an urge to reproduce so that my children can also poop and pee.
- Why would you wish that upon them?
  
  There's nothing better then a good poop.

To "live", and by "live" I mean experience and creat Art. I don't need more nor less.
- If I made it with honesty and care, it may not change the world, but it surely changes the people who will do it.
- Any hope that your art will change the world?

Correct the mistakes of my ancestors.
- Remarkable. Why do you think it's you that should do that?
  
  Who else will?
- Can you elaborate on what mistakes they did?
  
  Inventing Java.
  
  Not them personally but previous generations of British colonialism really (deliberately) screwed over the indigenous people in my country in a multitude of ways.
  Every descendant generation since has benefitted from that to the detriment of indigenous generations. I, and my children, benefit from it daily with superior schooling, housing, health, wealth, etc.
  Even the smallest things (e.g. voting for progressive government, volunteering, learning the language and culture, advocacy) that I can do to helps mitigate some of that harm.

To reduce human suffering by some degree, even if it's insignificant in the big picture.

Purpose?
- So much this.

To quote Carl Sagan, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

curiosity

To crush my enemies, see them driven before me and hear the lamentations of their women

On a cosmic timescale, facilitate a world with minimal suffering and maximal fulfillment.

I used to be flourishing as an artist. Now I'm just trying to not end up in a camp within the next 4+ years

Spend your life enjoying it and helping others enjoy theirs. As the universe unfolds, we've only got this one brief moment of consciousness before we disappear, we have to make our life filled with as much happiness as we can. And help others fill theirs.
- Have you looked into Epicuianism? Sounds like what you wrote fits.
  
  No. I came up with this myself as I was pondering the world, the universe, how there is no evidence of any god existing, and how the best science we have tells us that we are just matter and energy inhabiting spacetime. But matter arranged in such fantastically improbable way that we can feel happiness. Why waste the precious moments we've been given on doing anything other than striving to feel happiness? Which of course can come in different forms for every one of us.
  I've just had a quick search, I guess your message has a typo and you meant Epicureanism? It is similar to how I feel about life, but it seems to say that lack of pain and fear is enough to consider oneself happy. I'd go a bit further and postulate active pursuit of things that positively make you or fellow sentient beings feel pleasure.

Currently just trying to be a girl, be kind, and trying to help the people around me.
- I've sadly always experienced that answer as recursion without an end. "Turtles all the way down" malarkey.

To see the end of humanity. Luckily I don't have much longer to wait.

To make as many people as uncomfortable as I humanly can.

To spend time with the people I love.

Learning.

I'm on a life-long quest to finding the EXIT from this matrix. For this I have to become the supreme lord of Holy C

Being as comfortable as possible

Crush the patriarchy and bring about equity and equality. And jacking the hog…

Nothing. Purpose implies the potential for failure and while there are certainly circumstances that I would consider personal failures, there are none so great that they would invalidate my existence.
That said, I have a vision for my life and the state of the world that I would like to see realized. I want to see a world where climate change is taken seriously and recognized as the imminent threat that it is. It will be waiting on the other side of every economic crisis or war that man chooses to wage.

To enjoy myself. What exactly that means, changes over time.

Find out who I really am
- The Great Work. Hermetic kabbalah makes sense (psychology cloaked as religion, since humans are adverse we may be a little messed up and inner work is the only way through, and out). I'm just now scratching the surface but I'm digging it.

I hope to leave whatever spaces I inhabit better than before I was there. I also want to be a cute girl with a cute tummy and thick thighs. I believe these are both aligned with one another.
- Lol It's great when different values align and each builds towards your life purpose.

Spite a bunch of fuckheads and make some cool software whilst not forgetting to have fun along the way.

The purpose of life is to live.
My purpose in life is varied and technical and super-great.

To discover and adhere to an objectively moral life.
- Me too, but I started from the context of AGI safety: eventually we will make a superintelligent machine without any wisdom, that could be given any moral system, even making paperclips.
  So here's my draft of a logical path to maximal morality, and consequent values: https://www.quora.com/If-you-were-to-come-up-with-three-new-laws-of-robotics-what-would-they-be/answers/23692757
  Of course it was downvoted to oblivion on LessWrong, probably because they believe: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions

To annoy my wife.

Hentai

Not to die today

Pretending that working my ass off to make a ton of money (not for the sake of it, but because I don’t want to work my entire life) will eventually pay off.

To spread my genes around, mostly
- Stop licking every railing in the Eaton Centre, please.

it doesnt matter

You decide it yourself, thus it's for you to figure out. Personally, I like little things. Like pop rocks I bought earlier. I think they worth living a little, aren't they?

To be happy and enjoy things, and to make others happy in return! ❤️😌

I don't have one. I just do what I can to be a good person and that's it. And I'm ok with it.

To get as close to my true self as possible.
- Why do you think there's a true self if you're not close to it?
  
  The true self changes slightly with each new experience. So I can get close to it but I will never be it.

...to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, to be square, and to obey the law of the pack.
- Damn, turns out all I needed to know I learned in cub scouts

To be exploited in every way possible.

Purpose in life? I'm not American, sorry

97 comments