How I realized my life has no purpose (and neither does yours!)

I will use this as a place to record things I am thinking about since they are not suitable for most forms of conversation. I should note that I don't read philosophy so this will seem very obvious to people who do.

Thaler theorized on the idea of a dual-self model. In this model a planner-self with a low discount rate sets plans for a myopic doer-self to execute with the predictable high-jinks that come with such a wise planner trying to cope with such a boorish doer. I hoped to follow the advice of approaching this problem as a principal-agent problem and consequentially cutting deals with my doer-self for meeting goals. However, I was surprised to find that this worked very poorly, so I began to investigate.

I have never felt a sense of accomplishment or relief after finishing a goal, I decided, and it was because I still felt I was falling short of a larger goal or purpose by relaxing. I have never known what my purpose is and the idea has always haunted me. My general strategy has been to not fuck things up terribly so that when I eventually discover my purpose I can execute it.

But is it reasonable to think I have a purpose? I've been looking for one for at least ten years now, you'd think I'd at least have some leads by now. Well, I thought, what does having a purpose entail? Having a purpose implies purposeful creation. Somebody had to want me here, which is funny because nobody wanted me here. We are all products of a natural process of evolution.

Thus I was cast into the process of having an existential crisis. It seems funny now to think about how much it bothered me, but I felt it critical at the time that I keep soldiering on with intellectual honesty and curiosity. Many people, it seems, try to find a hack to avoid coming totally clean: I've created my own purpose! I reject this as intellectual dishonesty, as stupid as a car or a refrigerator designing their own purpose. And now that I've accepted what I believe to be true, I view it as strange.

A self-inflicted purpose is only for the truly sadistic. We were put on this earth either to accomplish some end or we were put here on "vacation". I believe we are here on vacation, and giving yourself some sentence to serve out while you exist is silly. You can have goals, but you need to realize that goals are not purposes. You have no purpose and you cannot change that.