Why Should We Continue Living? aka “Purpose of Life” is Actually an Optional Necessity

“Why should we choose to continue living” is a very fundamental question of philosophy. Philosophy generally tries to find solutions to problems from itself, instead of using a dogmatic source of truth, telling you you should choose living, without a rationale. And this means that you might start struggling once you leave the lands of dogmatic truths.

People generally get quite confused when they stop having religious reasons for continuing to do what they were doing before. Because after that point, everything needs to have an actual reason. And those reasons are not constructed easily. It takes years and years.

That’s why, the switch generally creates a vacuum, which makes people hesitate to get into the depths of philosophy.

With this article, i will explain what we are getting wrong, and that will help us understanding why the concept of “Purpose of living” is actually optional for living.

In this article, we will use the same methodology of how a mathematical induction works. A mathematical induction is done by

• Choosing an initial step, and proving that the rule holds for the starting step
• Proving that, every next step will hold for the rule

So, if we say, starting from the time that we are born (the initial step), in every moment we need to choose to live as our next step, this would mean we have an inductive proof, and we should choose living all the time.

First of all, we don’t choose to start living. Our parents decide to have us. Well… Most of the time. We can’t even choose to continue to live since it takes a long time for us to understand what is being alive, because as human babies, we start our lives totally retarded. We just exist. Therefore, the initial step holds.

Now let’s proceed to the second step of induction. In rest of the article, we will talk about why we should pick living over dying every time.

Adaptation

Everybody has a projection of future for themselves. And those projections are a full picture that consist of lots of small successes. As an example, you might have a projection of yourself for next year, and your aim is to have an improved version of yourself these times next year. Think it like a new year’s resolution. You decided to learn a new language, get good marks, learn how to play a new instrument, have better relationship with your friends et cetera. After taking your decision, you need to break these targets into smaller targets also right? As an example, for learning how to play guitar, you could say you will need to learn how to play all chords, how to do different finger picking styles, you could choose the amount of songs to learn, you could decide to get music theory. All these could be done in parallel. Then these also would needed to be broken down into targets that are achievable in smaller amount of times. Why do we do this? Because as life forms, we adapt to our environment to keep/increase our ability to interact with our environment. Let’s call it interaction surface with the universe to make it seem more like a philosophical term.

Now, to elaborate this “Interaction surface with the universe”, if you have one apple, you can eat that apple. If you have two apple, you might choose eating the sour one or the sweet one. This is your interaction surface with universe. When you have more options, you have a wider interaction surface.

• If you finish your school, now you are able to get a job and make money, and do more things.
• If you have a dream, you can think about one dream. If you have two type of dreams, now you have two subjects to think about. So you don’t even have to move to increase your interaction surface, even only existence of your mind lets you to increase the interaction surface with universe
• You might read a book and think about it to come up with more conclusions in your head. You have more ideas, which will let you to have even more ideas, building on top of them.
• If you die, you don’t have an interaction surface anymore. So this is something you evade.
• If you visit another country, now you know more about different cultures, and you know what else you can learn about them.
• If you loss a friend, you have less things to do. You evade losing people. You try to keep them.

That’s what intelligent is about. In every step, we try to increase our interaction capacity. If you only know your mother language, you can access a limited amount of resources to read, if you learn English, you can access much more. What do you do? You learn English.

We keep chasing our dreams, and achieving new targets in every step. Let’s visit an edge case (argumentum ad absurdum). What if we were always doing the same thing?

Think that you are playing the snake game.

Your aim is to eat as many food as possible till you accidentally bite yourself. The more the better. One could ask, why do we keep doing this? We will die at the end right? I believe this would be a tunnel vision, only focusing on the game.

Every time you play the snake game, you are a new version of yourself. You learn how to play better. If not, at least you had a new experience, or a new memory.

yourself1 -> plays game1 -> yourself2 -> plays game2 -> yourself3 …..

So what happens is; your consciousness is evolving according to the needs.

Isn’t this life? A life form is defined as a unit that adapts to the environment, and reproduces. If we leave the reproduction part to reach the essence, we reach what is intelligence. If we adapt to the changes, that means we are intelligent.

And this is what we do anyways. Constantly doing things, if possible doing new things, and collecting more and more memories. From those memories creating different perceptions of the reality around us.

We do, because we exist.

Setbacks

Where might this be going wrong then?

What keeps us up and going, is generally the notion of progress. Everybody wants to see that they are getting better and better. But sometimes life brings us some setbacks. You might lose somebody you love, or lose a big possession, or become weaker bodywise. People might be expecting a lot from you, and what you come up with might be a much smaller portion. If the people around you expect you to save the galaxy, saving Earth might be just a “meh”.

There are examples of some child prodigies that had so high IQ that they started lecturing in young age at prestigious universities, then left everything behind and chose to become ordinary people. It feels odd this way, but think that happiness is the ratio between the expectation and reality, and high expectations can be so strong that it can effect even the most intelligent of us.

Of course we are not having these feelings out of nothing. If we didn’t have the strong desperate feeling after losing important things, it would be much harder to be successful in life. Think that somebody steals all your life’s savings, and you say “Well, i don’t care”. That certainly doesn’t work. You would do everything you can to take it back.

Or think that you are very talented and you get the best education, you could become the best composer in the world, but ermm… You couldn’t!

We constantly strive for being utile for the society, to have a respectable place.

So those two situations, something very valuable that we lose, or not meeting the expectation of ourselves and the other people, they certainly should make us uncomfortable. But getting overwhelmed and thinking that life doesn’t worth living, is well… Not much of an intelligent move. So in every step, we need to consider only how we can have a better interaction surface. Even if it is decreasing, we can still chose the one that keeps the largest portion. You can never loss everything. Even if you lose everything, you will have your mind. If you lose your mind, well, that makes the question irrelevant since you can’t see options or choose one of them anymore.

Your mind gives you every kind of equipment to start everything from scratch.

Emotional Burden of a Setback

Disasters happen, people divorce, they lose people they love, and these are catastrophic but yet very common. Why do we get emotionally so weak?
Generally the problem happens when one is adjusting the expectations.

One of the ways that we perceive reality is, the reproducibility. If you know there is a coffee shop on the corner, it is as real as you can go and see it again. If somebody tells you that it never existed, you would rush there and show “Look it is there”. Every time you pass in front of it and something happens near, maybe you buy a coffee and have an interesting chat with somebody, you put a new memory to the heap of memories related with it. There is the reality which is constantly changing, and there is shadow of the reality in your brain that you are trying to reforge constantly to mirror the reality around you.

If it was a coffee shop that you spent your childhood around, brought your first date, if it was a road that you played games around, if it was the smell of the flowers that you were accustomed with, years later when you go back and see that nothing is the same, everybody is different, the street changed its name, the coffee shop is not there anymore, the buildings were rebuilt, the feeling that you have is part of your brain that considers itself not useful anymore. There is a new reality that has a big discrepancy with what you have as its shadow. Even without any expectations from that street, you feel the oddity.

Whenever catastrophes happen, part of your consciousness, your memories related to those people, your usual daily ceremonies, your plans, everything drops dead. Suddenly you wake up to a new reality, that all the things you learned are not applicable anymore. A part of your brain is out of sync with reality, a major part of it has no use anymore, except being a memory. It is dying with what you just lost. That is creating the emotional burden.

The disappointment of having the need of lowering the expectations from life while everything was going as expected is huge, but sometimes, one needs to forget about the past and just live at that moment. At least till they recover. One should adapt. Maybe one can learn something learn to decrease frequencies of references to the dead part of the brain, since topics will have no associations with the past. One should make their peace with the decrease on their surface of interaction with the universe, or just continue adapting.

Now let’s go back to the title, did we ever talk about having a purpose for life? No. Why? Because as you see, it is not necessary. That is not life. Life is adaptation. Life is every choice we make. Purpose of life is a human construct, which is necessary for dogmatic preconditioning when one doesn’t have enough philosophy in their life.