Life’s nonexistent purpose
Humans are the cause of their own problems. All the stress in our lives is only there because of what humans have evolved into. We became more intelligent and used our abilities to create this complex world where life is given a “purpose.” School, work, money, success; these things that stress humans out are only there because we put them there. We created them as a way to “improve” our species, and developed a society that is far more sophisticated than that of any other organism on the planet. But ultimately, why did we do this? What is the purpose of having such an intense way of life?
Human beings are always striving for something. As a child, you work to do well in school so you can go to a good college. You want a good education so that you can get a job that will be able to support you and any family you decide to have. You then continually work at whatever job you have in order to provide for yourself and have a happy life. You are taught to always be striving for success. But what even is success. Even if you have a happy life, you still die. Your children will still eventually die, and their children, and on and on forever and ever. And the thing is, even if you hadn’t worked so hard in life, you would still see the same end result. All humans die. Eventually the world will end, and our entire existence will be gone. We are just a tiny sliver on the timeline of the universe, and there is no real reason that we need to do a “good job” in life. Humans are always working towards some imaginary goal. We try so hard to be successful, as if that is going to change the end result in any way.
While this is a pretty pessimistic thing to say, in a way it can be taken as inspiration. Live a little. If you get a bad grade on that test, so what? If you don’t end up getting that super high paying job, who cares? The end of your life looks exactly the same as literally everybody else on the planet. You will die. Whether you are famous, or rich, or had good grades in college, or live in a tent on some mountain. You are still going to die.
There are only 2 problems I see with this form of inspiration. The first is that some people believe in the afterlife. They believe that the path their life takes will affect them once they die. I personally don’t believe in the afterlife, but for those who do, I still think that they can stress less. As long as you are being a good person, I think you’re ok. You still don’t have to be the most “successful” human out there in order to be well off in the afterlife. The other problem I see is the fact that people have rooted their happiness in their success. If they don’t get all A’s or they don’t make the next iPhone, they aren’t going to be happy. We have created a society where people are so fixated on reaching goals, whatever that may mean. So, even if we intellectually understand that in the end it literally doesn’t matter at all what you did with your life, we still aren’t going to change how our society works. We are still going to try and develop new technologies and make progress for the human race. We are still going to worry about getting good grades and making enough money.
This life we have created is so exhausting.
