Why Are We Here?

One of my friends asked me why it's worth making an effort in life. Even with recent economic difficulties, it is still possible to find a job capable of supporting yourself or a family that does not require all or even most of your mental and physical faculties. With that in mind, is it really worth all the stress needed to get a promotion, move on through graduate school, and keep successfully completing research projects, business ideas, and whatever other work comes your way? Wouldn't it be easier to just get that fairly lax position and do a mediocre job of it, going through life mostly unnoticed and spend most of your time off work relaxing?

My friend's question addresses one of the most basic questions that everyone will ask themselves at one point or another. Why are we here? What purpose are we supposed to serve in the life that we have?

One of the most common answers is that we are here as a test to see if we are worthy of Heaven or some other afterlife. I find this to be a singularly terrible answer. One of my favorite authors, Steven Erikson, had a great passage in one of his novels about this:

There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it. To strive for change, for true goodness in this mortal world, one must acknowledge and accept, within one's own soul, that this mortal reality has purpose in itself, that its greatest value is not for us, but for our children and their children. To view life as but a quick passage along a foul, tortured path-made foul and tortured by our own indifference-is to excuse all manner of misery and depravity, and to exact cruel punishment upon the innocent lives to come. I defy this notion of paradise beyond the gates of bone. If the soul truly survives the passage, then it behooves us-each of us, my friends-to nurture a faith in similitude: what awaits us is a reflection of what we leave behind, and in the squandering of our mortal existence, we surrender the opportunity to learn the ways of goodness, the practice of sympathy, empathy, compassion and healing-all passed by in our rush to arrive at a place of glory and beauty, a place we did not earn, and most certainly do not deserve.

Explaining that the purpose for life is for some afterlife essentially ignores the question. I hear this all the time in the empty gestures of sympathy people make to each other after terrible events.

"Your father is in a better place now."

"These things happen, there's nothing you could have done."

"Everything happens for a reason."

The main thing these three statements have in common is that they all relieve responsibility. Humans have no control over their fate, it's all up to chance or the whims of a higher power. But this just isn't true. The hard work of millions of people have led to us having more and more control over what happens to us. Five hundred years ago, if you got a bad cut it was all up to your body's immune system to determine whether you would develop septic shock and die or not. Now we have antibiotics that allow these sorts of wound infections to be relatively minor events.

The answer I gave to my friend's question was this. You're right, it is easy to just accept some minor, unknown role in the world and go through it unnoticed. It would probably make life a lot simpler, perhaps even make you happier if you are content with that. But there is a reason to work hard and try and create something for humanity. Any improvements you make to the world get passed along; the combined efforts of the millions of people on the world result in an improvement to the average welfare of humanity. It's true that not everyone is capable of say, discovering penicillin, but those discoveries are not possible without the support of thousands of other people who grow crops, deliver those crops to stores, clean laboratories, and fulfill other essential tasks of society.

It's true that some things seem worse. The economy hasn't been the best in the United States recently. It seems like there are more riots and unrest throughout the world than before-particularly in the Middle East, Italy, Greece, and other economically troubled regions. Although Osama bin Laden is dead, there are still large numbers of effective terrorists in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. It's easy to look at these events and feel like it's impossible to fix them. How is an individual person supposed to accomplish anything against the weight of governments, the realities of globalization and economics, and large-scale terrorist groups?

We can look at the example of Mohamed Bouazizi of Tunisia. His extremely public death by self immolation after he was forbidden from selling vegetables inspired the riots that brought down Tunisia's long serving dictator. One person can make a difference.

The world has come a long way in the last few hundred years. Fewer farmers are supporting millions of people more than ever was possible in the past. Cellular phones, airplanes, and the internet have made it so much easier to connect with others across the globe. People are living much longer than all but the luckiest individuals with the best genetics were capable of in the past. We can even take pictures of this:



These advances were all made through the combined work of hundreds of thousands of individuals. That is what your mental and physical labor contributes to-the progression of man.

That is my answer to why we are here. It's not as sexy as saying that it's all to see if you're worthy for a glorious afterlife, but it's the best I've yet to hear. Join me and don't accept that the something can't be done or that the negatives in the world are inevitable and irresolvable. Maybe some things are, but at least no one can claim that we didn't try our damnedest to fix them. We can all contribute to bettering humanity, one step at a time.