When I Figured Out The Purpose of Life, Perhaps I Should’ve Listened.
- Standing atop the Grand Canyon, gazing out into the abyss of 2 million-year-old rocks beneath you.
- Waking up, bleary-eyed, in a hospital bed after a near-death experience.
- Sitting around a dinner table with four generations of family laughing, smiling, and sharing stores.
These are the types of scenarios one might expect to ponder and gain insight into the meaning of life.
The moments in life you are likely to ask: “What’s my role in the universe?”, “Do I have a role?”, and “How might I fulfil that role?”.
My first moment of comprehending and answering these questions was significantly less poignant, less poetic, and less worthy of sharing. But here we are.
It begins with 17-year-old me—your typical teenage gal living in the suburbs (begrudgingly) of London.
A new shopping mall had opened in the city — the biggest mall in the country — and I decided there was no better place to spend my waitress/bar-girl/shop assistant salary.
I arrived at the mall two hours before it opened (even as a teenager I was a morning person).
My phone had no credit, and 17-year-old-me didn’t take a book with me everywhere I went so I plonked myself on a faux-leather pouffe and stared longingly at the bright lights and slender mannequins behind the metal shutters. As my eyes glazed over and I let out a yawn a thought came to me:
“The purpose of life is to not question the purpose of life.”
I know, it was a let down for me too, but it stuck around. Ringing in my mind at random moments in the 12 years since.
This week — as I began reading about neuroexistentialism — it cropped up again, this time with a little more curiosity on my part. Let me explain.
I am currently finishing writing a book The Purpose Myth and choosing a thesis subject for a degree in Applied Neuroscience. Out of curiosity, I Googled “Neuroscience of Purpose” and stumbled upon the relatively new field of neuro-existentialism. Sounds sexy, right?
Existentialism is, in essence, a philosophical concept which states that “people are free agents who have control over their choices and actions.”
Over the Decade of the Brain — so determined by President George W. Bush — huge investments were made in advancing neuroscience through improvements in brain imaging technology. As a result of these advances, researchers in other realms became interested in using these brain-imaging technologies to improve understanding in their own fields.
This led to a whole slew of novel research hypotheses in fields such as neurogenetics, neurolinguistics, neurolaw, neuromarketing, and neuroethics.
More recently, the fields of philosophical existentialism and neuroscience collided in research to result in this field of Neuroexistentialism.
Neuroexistentialism aims to leverage insights from novel brain imaging technology to provide scientific answers to the debate of existentialism; ultimately asking “do we have free will and what is the purpose of our existence?”
In a 2018 edition of The Philosopher’s Magazine Caruso and Flanagan, SUNY professors, argue that we have no soul, no fixed self, and no inherent purpose:
We exist simply because we exist, tiny specks on a small planet in an infinite universe, and not because a god made the Earth for us.
The researchers believe that our contemporary angst and the meaninglessness we feel in our lives has arisen from these scientific findings that elucidate this fact: being human is no big deal.
The latest findings show that “introspection, or self-knowledge, can’t really reveal the mind, and that death is the end for us all.”
The researchers believe that science has shown us that “the brain’s processes give us our experience of life and there is no “immaterial spirit” or soul, then when the brain stops functioning, nothing follows life, and nothing “survives” us.
“The self is a kind of necessary illusion manufactured by the brain and often more fragile than we’d like to imagine.” — Caruso and Flanagan
This is troubling as it sheds light on the purpose of purpose. From an evolutionary perspective, we have an innate need to believe that there is some greater purpose for our existence.
Victor Frankel, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, would surely agree: “There is nothing in the world […] that would so effectively help one to survive […] as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life.”
Neuroexistentialists should perhaps be careful about sharing their insight, even if it is true. It seems to me that our search for truth and knowledge has clashed with our need for purpose as we ultimately find there is none—the ultimate paradox.
Ultimately, there is a purpose for purpose. When science tells us that there is no purpose, only then do we have no purpose.
There is a reason we need to believe that there is a purpose of life, even if there isn’t one. The notion of having a life’s purpose is adaptive. It fuels the life force.
How can you go about your life, overcome its adversities, and also believe the researcher's conclusion that “we are just cells”?
You can’t.
So, perhaps my insight was a prescient one; that when it comes to the purpose of life — ignorance is bliss. Perhaps, the purpose of life is not to question the purpose of life.
