How to find purpose as a proton pumper
60 Days Beyond The Wall: Part 5
This is the fifth part in a multipart series. If you haven’t yet, check out Part 4. If that seems daunting, feel free to just read this — it should stand alone.
Chobe, Botswana, 3/29/2018, Genes that paint
I believe we are bound to find dissatisfaction when searching for an underlying, unchanging purpose in life. Time and again, philosophers have endeavored along this route only to find water that doesn’t seem to quench their thirst.
Up until modern history, life was pure struggle. Our evolutionary predecessors spent all waking hours eating to fuel the caloric demands of our increasingly complicated brains. It wasn’t until recent decades that more people began to die of obesity than starvation. I don’t think our starving ancestors wondered about the purpose of life or how to find happiness. What are we to do with ourselves now that we don’t spend the majority of our time defending our existence and looking for food?
This is the predicament in a nutshell. We have refined evolutionary machinery that once allowed us to run from lions and find food. This machine operates, looking for ways to survive and replicate on the modern stage, but we exist in a white collar behind a cubicle. For the first time in history, we have the free time to think about things like “purpose”… and we are losing our minds.
Is this urge to seek purpose just another form of “survive and replicate?” It’s possible that it is just the echo of what pushed us to survive in a world of constant struggle — a dog has the urge to bark ferociously at a pillow in the living room. Humans have an incredible ability to create a crisis when there is no good one immediately available. Maybe without the old struggle, we are inventing new crises to give us purpose.
It’s quite easy to fall into a state where it all feels so pointless.
The template we inherited for living feels arbitrary like Sisyphus rolling a boulder up a hill every day only to have it roll back down at day’s end. Life pumps protons so that it can go on pumping protons. We survive long enough to pass on our genes so that others can pass on theirs. We work to pay for rent and food only to go on working to pay for rent and food.
If there was one central theme that I’m hoping is starting to set in, it would be this:
There is no inherent point.
We endow things with purpose when we use them to accomplish something for us. We can decide and agree that the four pronged piece of steel, the fork, is better for eating than it is for fighting.
A rock doesn’t inherently have a purpose until we decide to throw it or use it to build a tool.
From one lens, life will always seem arbitrary and sisyphean. It most certainly is. However, I believe that this is just a starting point, a description of how life operates rather than advice on how it should be lived.
Whether we like it or not and for the foreseeable future, the efforts of our species will ultimately tie back to their evolutionary motivations — replicate and survive. We’re still a ways off from some form of immortality, but I imagine that even then, our basic evolutionary principles will be at play. This, of course, may become more nuanced — survival of the global human species rather than the individual or tribe, survival through the legacy of great works.
My point here is that despite these operating principles, we essentially have full creative license for how to direct our lives. To paint, one needs something to paint with and something to paint on. From this lens, painting is just the transfer of paint to painted surface. This description discounts what the artist decides to paint — the infinite set of possibilities and great works.
Make your life into an incredible painting — not too crowded, plenty of blank space so that focus goes to a few memorable areas of importance, some exquisitely detailed regions and others, vague brushstrokes. In this process, let things meander. A mountain may emerge from what originally felt like a river. You may paint things over.
Check out Part 6!
