who here on WP has a sense of purpose in life?

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who here on WP has a sense of purpose in life, or had a sense of purpose any time in their lives? if you don't have one, then please elaborate as to what you consider to be the reasons.

btw, a sense of purpose, to be clear, is a defined path in life, a strong clear sense of what you are here to do in life. i should have stated that in the beginning. sorry.

Last edited by auntblabby on 02 May 2019, 2:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Good question, sadly I don't think I do anymore. I'm not sure why I'm here or what to do.

if you don't mind, can you describe any life events that you are guessing had something to do with your losing "the name of action" [to borrow from Shakespeare]?

I'm not sure what is meant by "sense of purpose".... that could mean very different things to different people. I guess only the seriously religious might have an answer In common.

If pressed, I think for me itwould be something like Nietzsche's "Become what you are." For me, that's going as far as I can on the path I'm on as an artist and a person, using all my powers and qualities, very much including autism.

There have been times in my life when I've been blinded by everyday concerns and completely lost the "golden thread" (as Hermann Hesse called it) for years on end, but I hope never to do so again.

Last edited by Benjamin the Donkey on 02 May 2019, 2:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

I never even realised I had to have a sense of purpose. I remember (someone famous?) saying that if you avoid doing all the things you don't want to do, you'll end up doing something you want to do. But I still haven't decided what I want to do.
Looking back, I have actually done an awful lot of stuff... despite having low energy levels, (mostly for physical reasons). I suppose that 63 years is actually a lot of time to get get stuff done in.
Another factor is that I've also had a thing about not going backwards... so I do one thing and then I move on to something else. If I had just one major pre-occupation, like writing, painting, making music... I might have stuck to that.

Wake up, go through the motions, go back to sleep.

i thought as a child, that as an adult i'd like to be a broadcast [radio or tv] engineer, but when i graduated from school i found out that the only school in town with that kind of academic program, basically didn't want me [not mathematically gifted, not physically vigorous are the two biggies, in addition to not having transportation to and from the school which was on the other side of town, in a town lacking public transit to where i lived [out in the sticks]. so i drifted, stumbled, from situation to situation, wondering when things would fall into a groove. they never did. and here i am now, in the September of my years, finding out finally, that my niche is being a hermit out in the woods. i wonder how my life would have turned out had i been able to find this out when i was young, it would have saved me a certain amount of drama and heartbreak in my life.

so i'm the only one whose sense of purpose was to desire a dark chocolate ice cream?

(clicky)more about a sense of purpose and where it comes from

I had one, but yeah then life...plus adults telling me I wouldn't care anymore, turns out I should have never stopped caring because then maybe I could have done something. I certainly forgot about the environment and climate change for a while, it wasn't a popular topic for a 7 year old kid in the 90s to talk about so I gave into the discouragement and stopped caring. I was still aware but figured maybe the adults were right, that it wouldn't cause problems for millions of years or whatever.

Now I don't even know what I could possibly really do to help the situation, not that there is anything I could have really done as a kid but it does frusterate me that people encouraged apathy about it, and it turns out I should have never listened to any of them. I ended up being a weird kid no one liked but if I hadn't given into that discouragement I would have at least been the weird kid talking about climate change in the 90's.....now there is a swedish girl doing just that except its not the 90's its 2019 and nothing regarding climate change has been addressed really.

But mostly I knew it was a problem as a little kid, adults told me it wasn't so I stupidly trusted them on it for a while.

^^^IMHO one of the better life purposes one can have, is to care about our world.

Well, do we all agree that there is no intrinsic meaning to life?
Good...
We are all enlightened individuals then...
I am so proud of you all...

Since there is no inherent meaning to life, we could embrace a hardcore nihilism...
Or...
My preference is to embrace existentialism and create our own...

Oh...
Yes, when I was young with half a developed brain, with virtually no life experience, I automatically assumed there was a reason for being born into this life system...
After all, what parent would bring children into a world they haven't studied and deemed wholesome and meaningful?

I don’t .

Get through the day intact.

Ah yes...
She has been described as: "The holy fool..."





You forgot: Eat and poop...
This is very important...

Last edited by Pepe on 02 May 2019, 3:59 am, edited 1 time in total.

To me it seems when you post here you are not going through the motions. I would guess yours is to find flaws and hypocrisy in progressive orthodoxy.