What do you want to do before you die?
Life has no meaning by its own. Hence, it is rather difficult to have a definite purpose in life.
So, if you are struggling to find a purpose, it means that you are quite a reasonable person.
When we are born, we are not born by our choice. Our circumstances and our relations by birth are fundamentally out of our control.
However, as any other living organism, in order to function, we have some basic needs. Most of life’s endeavours are supposed to be directed at fulfilling these needs. Hence, we must pick up basic education when we are growing up that helps us to get a job, start a business or do something later in life, to earn money. Earning money in order to get food, find a shelter, buy clothing to protect against cold makes a lot of sense. There are further basic needs that crop up later in life, like having a partner and propagating your genes through your children - these must be addressed to avoid the negative consequences, much like if you don’t eat when you are hungry.
“Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid.
Maslow’s is an interesting theory. However, I have never really seen this in practise in its purest form. Mostly folks who have fulfilled their basic needs, keep on gathering more of the same thing, rather than moving up the hierarchy.
Why do we do this?
Well, this is because meeting today’s needs don’t guarantee us of fulfilling them tomorrow. Hence, we find ingenious ways to hoard more and more money, actually maximise this hoarding in a rather unsustainable way, to ensure a secure future.
In a way, more money does help us move up the Maslow’s hierarchy - in real life we are able to make more friends, sense of accomplishment increases and we would find time to participate in creative activities if we had more and more money. But this position is somewhat artificial as the value is assigned to the money that we have, and not who we are without that.
This situation increases the feeling of hollowness inside us and saps out all the vitality from our soul. For example, you may respect your CEO or boss in your office, but may not necessarily respect them without their position. Do you respect him/her as a person, or because of his/ her temporary power? Money also does something similar to us, hence we cling to money, and try to get more of it, because without money, we feel insecure and believe that everything around us will fall apart. This is infact true, unfortunately.
So, going after money solves most of life’s ordinary problems in the short and medium term. In the long term, we are dead.
In this struggle for existence, some of us end up building wonderful things, that transcend the problems around us and create new paradigms and take the civilization forward.
This money-driven system has many flaws, because everything else gets deprioritized over money. Do we have a better way of functioning?
The idealism in me wants to think there must be, but the reasonable me can’t ponder of any other possibilities given the constraints of the world.
So, the purpose of life is to explore the world, meet basic needs and strive to fulfill higher order needs while aligning oneself with the continuous pursuit of money.
This is similar to a car running on fuel, we are running on money. The car can go anywhere we want to take it to, a mountain or a forest or to our office in the city, but to go anywhere it needs fuel. We are the “car”, and money is the “fuel” that we thrive on.
Coming back to the title of this article - what do you want to do before you die?
When I started writing, I was not sure about this. But, after writing down my thoughts, it seems ample clear to me on how to approach this problem.
I made a nice systematic flow chart in my diary on the same. Rather than sharing the same, I would prefer to share the gist here.
It is imperative to learn and explore about life and the world
Identify what you like and what you don’t
Choose whether you want to do something about the things you like or things you don’t like about the world
If you think you can make money while doing these things, it makes more sense to pursue them seriously
Eventually, you will need to prioritize and choose one thing over the others
You may fail to achieve the desired outcomes, and hence, you may need to either iterate a couple of times, or reprioritize or again go back to the exploration stage
Finally, you will have to do with what you could achieve in your time
In all of this, where I struggled significantly in my life was to have courage to think and act on the same, without getting too distracted. In my life, thoughts would get muddled by the daily stress of existence and my ability to act would get crushed by the burden of my thoughts. So, it is rather important to seek clarity and guidance in this journey of life, and one can only hope to get lucky as well in this pursuit.
We will all die eventually, some early and some late. Therefore, we may not be too worried about what we could achieve in our lifetime, as our very existence is a resistance against the order of nature, whatever little we could achieve, will act as a base for the next generation to start from.
Unfortunately, there is a long list of big problems staring at humanity. So, our generation and next to follow will have a lot to work on.
Climate stress / change
Poverty and economic distress for vast majority in the world
Pollution from industrialization - unsustainable energy sources
Fighting diseases and pandemics - improving public health
Better society and governance - terrorism, corruption, etc
Capitalism and wealth inequality - will the current model work?
Lack of innovation - role of public vs private equity
Anxiety & depression - social fabric & family systems are breaking up
& more….
All of our endeavours and lives at large will be of great worth if we can align our livelihoods to solving one or more of these problems and generating immense value for the society. However, we may not necessarily disrupt the existing order of things to survive, there are many good things that have been built in the past and have matured into institutions, and we could be able to find our place within those as well. Just to emphasize once again - running the existing institutions and the socio-economic order is no mean task.
Thanks for reading.