Someone had me and I am not committing suicide so survival, maintenance/comfort-seeking, and entertainment-seeking mediated through cultural institutions, and linguistically generalized learning brain capacity is essentially what I and most of humanity is doing.

I exist; I like it, more or less. What do I need a purpose for? 50¢ and a purpose will not get me a cup of coffee.

You were probably thinking people had these deep thoughts about their existence. Bah! Humbug!

"God didn't create the universe because he was looking for a job."

Henry Miller, American novelist

There's a very good short film about the purpose of human existence that was made for the 1964 New York World's Fair by the Mormon Church in the U.S.A. called "Man's Search For Happiness" that you can find on the net.

How about Gurdjieff's view that we are being farmed like sheep to 'transform psychic energy from coarse to fine for higher beings' ! :wink:

The purpose is to find something purposeful. It's not necessarily a given, or a pre-set, although individuals might have aptitudes. So if you've got potential in some area, like sport or music, then you can find purpose in improving and honing your skills. If you don't have any obvious talents, then find some way to be useful. There's always something that can be found, even in difficult circumstances. Read Frankl.

Contribute and tell us why you exist. — jorgealarcon

Because God has a sense of humour. :smile:

Explore. Including the exploration of the term ‘purpose’.

A quote from Clive Barker’s Galilee, “we burn so hard yet shed so little light.” That just about sums up the human thirst for something more.

I would say we’re human beings trying to be more. Some think less is more. Underneath all of this all I can honestly say is we hunger and thirst for far more than mere sustenance or fleeting control/power. What we resist everyday - blindly to some degree or another - is ‘purpose’. We seem perverse, and perversely we scramble forward in life because of such perversity (our contrary nature is almost like a beneficial insanity).

In reference to Clive Barker’s quote above it is a rare thing to feel our inner light shine outwardly. I’ve been lucky enough to be burdened with that memory - and held it long enough to matter - but I fear others have not and prefer to confines of an icy cage than stepping into the darkness without a light.

Purpose in this sense is that which life fears gaze upon yet it only exists because of it. For me it is not about ‘finding purpose’ anymore, it is about recognising that I am Purpose.

"why you exist" and "what's the purpose of your existence" can be viewed as two different questions.

"Why I exist" can be answered both from a deterministic approach, or from a metaphysical approach. I know the deterministic one (because my father impregnated my mom and I haven't died) and I have no clue, no claim, over the metaphysical approach; in fact, I deny there is a metaphysical reason for my existence.

"What's the purpose of my existence" is a funny one. It presumes that there is a great, big, final purpose for which it is worth living the life, and perhaps serving some goal while living this life. I also don't believe there is a grand purpose to my life, but I do experience and set goals as purposes to short-range efforts.

Choosing a purpose always struck me as akin to choosing a favorite color, favorite food, favorite musical artist, etc.

I like a lot of different things. I like variety. I don't have just one favorite anything. I don't really think in terms of ranked lists. So I'm not about to just choose a single purpose either. If it's satisfying to someone to choose a single purpose, that's fine for them. Settle on just one purpose then. But choosing single favorites (or even small lists of them) feels uncomfortable/awkward to me.

I am certain many of you here have thought about why you exist at one point in your life. Is it to pig out and resemble an animal than a human being? Is it to pretend this life is paradise and try to make it as enjoyable as possible? Is it to blur and dull your consciousness through drugs? We all have our personal beliefs. Contribute and tell us why you exist. — jorgealarcon

Is it really necessary for any of us to have a purpose? I remember when I was younger I use to think I (as well as other people) really needed to have a purpose but as I got older the purposes I would invent for myself got less and less important until they started getting so moot that I really didn't care anymore.

Maybe I forgot something but as far as I can remember I mostly played the game of defining a purpose was in order for me to get through a day of school or work in order to help me emotionally deal with things. Since I don't care about much anymore it has gotten to be less important to me then it use to be.

I am certain many of you here have thought about why you exist at one point in your life. Is it to pig out and resemble an animal than a human being? Is it to pretend this life is paradise and try to make it as enjoyable as possible? Is it to blur and dull your consciousness through drugs? We all have our personal beliefs. Contribute and tell us why you exist. — jorgealarcon

I see no reason to speak as if "existence" were purposive. A carbon molecule, a stone, a thunderbolt, a galaxy... may be said to "exist", but not by the same token to be purposive.

A sentient agent is purposive. It acts with purpose. Animals like us experience feelings of impulse, appetite, desire, emotion. Feelings of this sort provide us with motives to purposive action. If it's right to say a dog feels hunger, then I suppose it must be right to say a dog is aware of its own hunger, much as I am aware of my own hunger when I feel it. Of course it seems absurd to claim that a hungry dog sitting ready at its bowl in the face of reliable signs that food is about to be served, has no idea what it's doing or why. The dog's action has a purpose motivated, in this case, by a feeling of appetite. The dog understands its own actions and its own purposes in its own way.

Each of us has motives and purposes in action, like the dog. As human animals, our conceptual, cultural, and practical capacities are more powerful, refined, and adaptable than the dog's, so we have a wider range of potential purposes and actions, including deliberative techniques, and can learn to recognize a wider range of motives at work in ourselves and in others. We may even stumble into a conception, and aspire to the corresponding ideal, of uniting all our action "under a single purpose".

I see no reason to speak, however, as if any of us, dogs or human beings, is born into the world with a definite special purpose in action corresponding uniquely to the individual animal or to is kind.


I see no reason to suppose that each human being has the same single purpose in action as all the others, whether he knows it or not, whether he wants it or not. One might argue that this thought, the thought that individual agents or species of agent each has a unique or special purpose in action for all time, assigned to it by its nature, involves a conflation of multiple conceptions of "purpose". These three, at least, seem relevant:


i) In the first place, there is the conception of the distinct "purposes" (ends, objects) corresponding to distinct purposive actions undertaken purposively by motivated sentient agents.

I've already suggested there seems no reason to suppose that all agents or each agent must have a single basic or unifying purpose in this sense, a single reason for acting in each instance, by its nature.


ii) The agent's purposes in action are, so to speak, projected through the tools, and plans, and other means employed by the agent in an attempt to achieve purposive ends.

We design and build hammers for pounding and tapping. We use hammers when there are things we mean to pound and tap. Along these lines, we may say all good hammers have the same purpose; and we may distinguish various sorts of hammer according to various special functions that hammers may serve. We apply the same instrumental conception of purpose when we breed dogs to be good retrievers, guards, or affectionate companions, and when we breed horses to race, to carry heavy loads long distances, or to serve as warriors' mounts in battle.

I bestow an instrumental purpose to the horse when I yoke it to my own purposes in action. Would you ask me, what instrumental purpose does the horse serve, in itself, at all times, apart from any such connection to the specific practical concerns of other sentient agents? Of course the horse has no such single purpose, and the human being has no such single purpose, and no thing has any such purpose. There is no such thing as such a purpose. The thought of such a purpose seems ill-conceived.

Along these lines it would seem the claim that each of us has "a purpose" by nature, if this claim were not self-defeating, would entail that each of us is another's tool.


iii) It seems we may form a coherent conception of "purpose" according to which each thing that exists has the same sort of purpose-in-existence: to be exactly what it is.

From one point of view this is an empty tautological formula. From another point of view, compatible with the former, it is a marginally useful claim that may help the rational imagination guide the human agent by characterizing totality, by demonstrating the limits of reason, and by providing a rational basis for a sense of conceptual completeness and satisfaction. Behold, the harmony of all things.

Of course, apart from that generic instructive force, this conception of purpose has no definitive content. It doesn't tell us anything about the specific values and ends that guide our action as sentient animals.

I exist. I was born. I didn't make the world.

Straight to the point.
Its up to us who we will become since we are all 'Present' and by that i mean your body and your soul is yours and that means you are 100% controling you and your future,so in other word we exist for us to life by our rule , but that's doesn't mean that GOD didn't exist, If we Speak Theology, God created us for an Achievement that we haven't discovered, yet. sorry if my language bit wobbly

You make your own purposes or points.

You can change your life if you're dissatisfied.

I am purely decorative.

I am good at some things. Handy, if you will.
As I get older, there is developing an odd inverse reciprocal relationship between what is easy for me and what is interesting. I still like to do what is easy. But as the shadows lengthen, I cannot help but be more interested in what has always kicked my ass.
So, the above is a way to suggest we hand out assignments to ourselves and it is very difficult to carry them out.
We are too full, not too empty.

To me, our purpose in life is determined by us and is discovered as we go through life. For me it would be survival and being my best, it may not
Fancy, but it provides me a reason to keep going.

If I had to explain it to you, it wouldn't be funny anymore.

I stole that.