Dissecting belief: Purpose

This week’s prompt (or to be exact last week’s prompt) was a freestyle writing, meaning that there is no set topic that we set to write about this week, each of us can write anything.

With this opportunity, I would like to introduce Dissecting Belief. Dissecting belief is a writing series that will contain my attempt to really understand what I believe about a certain concept e.g. politics, philosophy — all kinds of concept really. I am very excited to introduce this since understanding my belief, which in turn will lead me to understand my self a little bit better, was the initial goal on why I decided to start this writing habit.

This week I want to answer the question of

What is my purpose in life?

It’s a very loaded question, and to be quite honest to expect me figuring the answer out in this session of self-reflection is almost ridiculous. In this writing, I will just spit out what are the things that happen to randomly spawn in my mind when I was confronted by the question.

As I write this writing, I am at the top of Austin New Central Library. The view is so gorgeous up here and this place is easily my favorite spot in Austin so far. Here I played a mind game where I ask my self,

“what would happen if I decided to jump out of this building and be dead when I hit the ground?”

I asked this question in an attempt to address the main question of what is my purpose in life.

The dictionary definition of purpose is:

“the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists”

And this question is indirectly asking

“what would happen if suddenly I decided to not exist anymore”.

The first thing that came up to my mind was “obviously, my mom will be really, really sad”. And I think a lot of my friend will be very sad. I am saying this not from a narcissistic point of view, I said this because I once tragically lost a friend because he had an accident and know how it feels to lose someone before his time.

The second thing that came up to my mind was I think people will be confused and curious about why I decided to kill my self. I was thinking about this because this is what I would do if I found a close person to me decided to end his / her life. They might take a look at all of my personal internet footprints mostly on Facebook, Twitter, and maybe Github. They might try to figure out what are the last things that I was thinking about? what are the last conflicts that I might have? source of stress? source of frustration?

This thought leads me to think a series of thoughts: The reason that I exist is to be a story that other people observe, or a story that might affect other people. People might be curious about my life because I think they are curious about how my life affected theirs. People might be curious about what might my life means to them.

There is an overarching theme of the answer and thoughts that came up to my mind when answering what would happen if I decided to not exist anymore. And the theme is how my death (non-existence) affect others. Note that I didn’t talk about what will happen to me when I jump out of the building, it is because what will happen to me is pretty obvious: I’ll be dead. How my death affect the others? Not so obvious. And I think my purpose in life lies somewhere there.