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Other articles in Arts & Entertainment > Philosophy
I'm Dying, So What? 27 February 2009
Irrational Happiness 16 February 2009
Marsh's Rules for Discourse 16 February 2009
| Purposeless is the new Purpose |
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| Arts & Entertainment > Philosophy |
| Written by Haley Michele Potiker |
| Saturday, 24 January 2009 18:33 |
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The word “purpose” is very interesting because it is very deceiving. “Purpose” implies not only reason of action, but ultimate destination – it defines someone’s entire life course on a grand scale. Everyone is supposed to have a life purpose – a life’s work – and they are supposed to have it at least vaguely planned out since high school, where they earn the grades they need to get into the college best suited to their life’s purpose in order to pursue the studies best suited to their life’s purpose and eventually graduate and use their knowledge to pursue that purpose. The word “purposeless”, on the other hand, implies stagnation, aimlessness, and vacant space. It seems that nothing useful evolves from purposeless, unless it is some brilliant miracle or a stroke of blind luck. But upon closer examination, purpose isn’t everything. In fact, more often than not, having an ultimate “purpose” may very well lead to the exact stagnation that “purposeless” connotates. Think about it this way: “purpose” implies a constant push in one direction. It implies the active pursuit of a single goal throughout the course of ones entire life. But is it even possible to be actively thinking about the same goal for every minute of every day of every year? At some point, any person pursuing any goal will have to sit down and be miserable between the hours of nine to five – will wander around aimlessly at the mall trying to waste their time – will funnel money they could be spending into an IRA or their house payment. And during that time, what are they doing? Just blatantly murdering valuable time – killing time in order to advance closer to a goal so distant that by the time they actually get there, they probably wont remember what they did the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college, or what they thought about day to day, or what their alternative dreams may have been. People with a life’s purpose have only one thing on their mind – the destination. I don’t know if fixating on an ending point makes life move faster or slower. I do know that it makes life a whole lot less enjoyable. So what about the people that don’t have a definite purpose mapped out for them yet? They are told to panic about it – to find something that’s going to make them happy. They take their time and explore all sorts of knowledge. They take classes that sound amusing and go on vacation to far away places. They become good at things like guitar, or painting, or chess. And they eventually end up in the same place as the purposeful people, except probably a bit more cultured and a whole lot happier. |
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