A Scientist’s Meaning of Life
Meaning of life equation:
The genetic baseline position within a spectrum of pleasurable feelings vs unpleasant feelings when undergoing typical experiences during a standard human life
+Environmental experience gathered through the testing phases of the early/developing stages of life
+Social expectations within a given community and the positive feelings derived from helping those within it
=A “meaning/purpose” of life that is based around what value you can provide your immediate and wider social circle, after fulfilling your health requirements and eliminating potential perceived threats.
Please Don’t Run!!!
I’m assuming to most people that equation looks cold, clinical, and nowhere near as exciting as most personal development or spirituality guru coaches play it out to be.
We’re used to social media posts telling us that we just need to follow our passion, but we are then left with further questions. Questions that make us feel special because apparently, we all have some magical quest that is ingrained in our “fate”, that we have to discover ourselves.
If that was the case, how could we ever know for sure that we have picked the right path to follow?
So before becoming further confused by the bullshit that self-help gurus peddle to pocket your cash, and being trapped by the cognitive dissonance of feeling both powerful and powerless at the same time, bear with me as I attempt to explain a scientific and a personalised view of the meaning of life. To understand this view we need to unpack the aforementioned equation.
Genetic Baseline (What your mamma gave ya):
Without getting too involved in the details, your genes are essentially a blueprint provided to you from the DNA passed on from your parents. While a lot of unique characteristics can be determined from your genes, most of them stay consistent across the human race.
This means we are all much more similar to each other than we may realise and we have quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to life choices. In saying that, some of us are much more likely to become better at certain sports, creative outlets, and jobs than others.
Our genetic baseline provides us with a starting point to build upon and operate from environmental experience. If something is inherently easier for one person than another, they will be more likely to want to spend time doing that task as it causes less pain. Building even more experience and further developing those skills they already had a small advantage at.
However, as I touched upon before, genes are just a baseline to work from. To believe that genetics can predetermine your life leaves some people feeling powerless. This creates a feedback loop that reinforces their beliefs.
If your whole family is overweight and suffers from heart disease, that doesn’t mean you have to as well. Your environmental experience can change your overall outcome. This does make it hard when you are a child and stuck in a similar environment, but you have the power to change it as an adult in the modern world.
Environmental experience (The things we do):
The purpose of experiencing the environment with our senses is to give us a complex map that will make us better at predicting future threats (eat me)and detecting organic matter that we can convert to energy (eat you). As we age, especially during our childhood, our brains develop these mental maps to influence the adaptation of our bodies so we can survive long enough to reproduce and run as efficiently as possible.
This example is demonstrated quite effectively when we learn to ride a bicycle. When you first jump on a bicycle, the task is ridiculously challenging. Learning feels exhausting, frustrating, and far from efficient. Over time, we learn to do as little as possible with maximal effort and suddenly it feels like we can ride a bicycle without even thinking. Learning efficiency in action.
So what do learning and genetics have to do with the meaning of life?
Everything that we do contributes to a mental point system that builds a personality and skill set, like training a character from a video game. This skillset makes you more efficient at completing a task and as a result, the tasks become more enjoyable as they don’t consume as much energy. Overall, the benefits that you and your immediate social circle gain from these tasks provide you with more of a net positive feeling, which is commonly perceived as projects that you are passionate about. Which brings us to the next topic…
Social Expectations (How we fit in):
This should come as no surprise but human beings are incredibly social creatures that require interaction to feel happy, healthy, and to achieve something greater than they can individually.
Being part of a community can help us to eliminate feelings of depression and to feel like we have a purpose in our lives. However, it is not always as cut and dry as hanging out with anybody so we can fill a relationship quota. To get the benefits of social interaction we need to find a group that we can relate to and fit in with the unique complementary skills that help us to act cohesively.
Once we develop a group, which could take the form of anything from a sports team, a city, or even a sewing club, we begin to fulfill some kind of niche within that group. That niche builds expectations and dependency inside that group. When people depend on you, within obvious limits, you feel a sense of belonging, that can masquerade as a purpose. So, by taking the skills we develop from our environmental exposure and incorporating them into a group that can utilise those skills, we can improve the overall happiness we feel daily.
A sciency example of when working together fails: Niches reduce the amount of energy required from each cell in our body, so they work together to eliminate the need for each cell to do all tasks to survive. However, the ecosystem within each of our unique and individual bodies are incapable of resisting entropy and must eventually disintegrate. This happens when the organisms operating inside us lose their cooperative cohesiveness. By reproducing, an organism can continue the process the homogeneity and energy dispersal and the overall unit will either become more efficient or fail to survive.
What Does This All Mean?
If like the rest of the modern world, you are on the pursuit of happiness and believe that by finding your passion you will achieve it, rest assured that no amount of vision quests or monetary funding will provide you with the answers you’re looking for. It may not be exciting or a sexy answer but the things we passionate about are derived from genetic predisposition (to a small extent), the amount of experience we have at that skill, and how we can use these skills to contribute to our community.
There are always exceptions to the rule and some people are lucky enough to have found something they enjoy without thinking too hard. However (pause for a big breath here), to find something that can give our lives meaning requires trying out a number of different things for long enough, until you have a general grasp over whether your preexisting experiences and genetics have made the task easy enough for you to harness more joy than pain, and finding a way to do that task for the people in your community who reward you for your contributions (either social acceptance or some sort of payment that improves your life further).
If your main objective is to work on your “meaning of life” feel free to stop reading. If you would like to go down the rabbit hole of why we should bother, notes are provided below.
What is the true goal of humanity?:
For those of you brave enough to venture into the desires of human beings without being too attached to the illusion of control that affects our judgment, read on…
Internal motives:
- Escape from potential danger with ongoing renewed perspective when required.
- Leads to “comfort” and increased sensitivity to danger when none is present. The body/mind still search for danger even when none is present and chronic stress/disease occurs.
- Drive towards organic material that can be broken down and converted into energy.
- Dense sources of energy are preferred, such as fruit and fat. Gorging during the summer on fruits helps to store fat so we can survive a famine during the winter. We still have these preferences even though our environment has changed, so we get fat all year round without the famine. Leads to sickness. Carrying fat is not a healthy thing to do over long periods but it was better than not storing it when the possibility of having no food around would cause death.
- Replication of self. Requires adapting to changing sexual preferences of the opposite sex to become a favourable mate.
- Humans will change physical appearance, collect items that display characteristics of a mate that can look after offspring (such as health or displays of wealth), and act in a manner that attracts the opposite mate. This may be a sign of strength, good genetics, or parental instincts.
- Some things can’t be changed and the individual must aim to work around any kind of negative attributes by developing other positive ones.
- Failure to do so will result in reduced mate quality or absence of attraction.
External motives:
- Purpose
- The search for a position that one can fill within a community that gives them value. May be an action or skill that is useful for the group as a whole or a skill that one can develop that helps them to communicate with others more effectively (art or creative avenue).
- The pursuit of happiness. The unrelenting drive to find something that will provide happiness indefinitely and remove them from discomfort/pain indefinitely. A pointless quest as the body adapts to its environment over time. Happiness is a feeling that occurs when one is removed from pain or provided something that encourages growth. It is relative to the person’s overall environmental experience, so extreme doses of joy can cause fluctuation and a huge depressive state.
- Connection with others
- Building a connection with other people helps us to feel part of a group and not alone. Feeling alone creates a sense of helplessness and depression.
- Art, film, and music are great ways of communicating on a larger scale than normal social interaction. By reaching a larger group of people you can filter through more people who aren’t like you to find suitable members for your “tribe”. It also helps to share ideas that are indescribable via conversation.
- Amounting wealth (money and things)
- Trading time and energy for money (a promissory note) with the hope that having a surplus of it can provide security, attract a mate (because of the perceived security), trade it for things that may give happiness briefly, and increase the status of the individual within the group.
- Amassing wealth may draw attractive mates and to you and superficial respect, but their motives are hard to discover. There is less of a team dynamic during interactions and people will fight for your time with the hope that you will look after them.
- There is a threshold of money, depending on the economy within a political system, that can be reached that will remove some fear of unpredictable circumstances. After this level is passed there is very little to be gained. Excess leads to trying to buy happiness, jealousy of others, and fear of loss.
- Chasing power. The desire to appear more important than others within your community. The same effects apply from amounting wealth. Threat levels start to increase when competitors and those who are negatively affected by your unfair distribution of wealth decide action is required to shake you from your ranks. Some individuals may get a large dopamine hit from taking from others and collecting more resources.
- Advancing humanity
- The illusion there is a level of intelligence/technological advancement that can be increased. It is relative to the human definition of these unmeasurable categories. Intelligence is not defined well. IQ is only predictive of success up to 100 and even then, success is not measured empirically. So if the technology is dependent on increasing intelligence and making our lives better we are chasing an unreachable goal.
- We can make our lives easier, but this results in decreasing the quality of our lives unless we can emulate the needs that evolution has requested of us while pushing us with eustress occasionally to build resilience and to appreciate fulfillment.
- Eliminating inequality
- We have an uncomfortable feeling that makes us either avoid witnessing those who are suffering or try to remedy the situation somehow. If somebody was suffering within our immediate group we would likely suffer as a whole from a reduction in support. Everybody filled a niche within a tribe and if somebody is indisposed they will all be threatened to some extent, so it makes sense to feel an urge to change this. Now that we have exposure to the entire planet via the internet we have incomplete connections with people we otherwise would never have met in person.
- We also strive for equality so we can reduce competition and threat of the unfortunate, that may attempt to take what we have.
- Sharing information
- Sharing experience with others makes the group more intelligent as a whole. The group becomes more cohesive from a deeper understanding of each other, they know more about the world and increase their chances of survival in an unpredictable environment.
- Collecting information
- Learning is the ability to investigate the external environment to better protect an individual from dangerous interactions and to increase chances of finding organic matter to extract energy from.
- Altruism
- By helping others you create a bond/reciprocal relationship. When one is struggling the other will likely help. This makes survival much easier to achieve.
- Selfishness is useful short-term but fails when cooperation is required. Being altruistic is a much more logical way of surviving long-term.
What Can We Take From This?
Humans are not much different from other animals except we operate in a manner that encourages social interaction. Our tendency to distance ourselves from other animals gives us a sense of superiority and that results in us believing we have control over our evolution.
In reality, our physiology has barely changed in the last 200,000 years or so and we should be living in a way that takes advantage of that. Culture is an example of experiences and adaptions from certain living conditions and is more or less alternative answers to the same question: How do we avoid death long enough to reproduce?
