Imagine yourself going to a fabulously interesting and culturally rich city, some exotic metro area you've only seen in movies. Perhaps for a few it is New York City or Los Angeles, but I am thinking more along the lines of Seoul, Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong (developing countries are much more interesting).
You spend weeks looking through websites and blogs about the city. What an amazing place! You've planned out all the interesting destinations you will visit and each night you are deluded with dreams about the excited and fascinating people you will meet. The energy of the city is so obvious it comes alive to you even now, thousand of miles away! Your own life, though satisfying, seems like a comatose state compared to the constant night parties and day adventures of this destination metropolis.
Oh, but one thing: you are going on business and will have no time to do anything interesting.
Your trip has a purpose, you see, and you must execute that purpose. There will be a factory tour you are to take part in, several meetings with your foreign contemporaries, and every meal is planned with some manager trying to sell you their services or investor who you must woo. You know these people and they are all inescapably dull and long-winded, interested only in themselves and the most base aspects of the industry. Perhaps you will get to see a party from your hotel room as you get ready for bed, but keep the evening voyeurism brief: you've got early meetings every day you are there.
Your trip now sounds like a complete drag, and in such an awesome city! This is what it is to have a purpose in life.
Facing the fact that you have no purpose to live is facing that you were not sent here on a mission, but instead on a vacation. The natural urge with a vacation is to plan plenty of downtime, broken up by attractions and activities which allow you to fully experience and enjoy the location and context of your break. As aforementioned, you should not think of this hedonic resolution as a purpose, as your happiness is only as consequential as you are, and you are gloriously inconsequential in every way.
I guess I don't understand, to some degree, why people are so adverse to the idea that their lives are purposeless, as if they want their lives on earth to be some kind of prison sentence. Seeing that you have no purpose means there is no failure or success at life, and there is instead just living. Can anything be more liberating?
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