Life and purpose

Does life have a purpose?

Let’s talk about it.

Short answer? No. Life has no inherent purpose outside of what you make of it. The long answer? Buckle up—you’re in for a ride.

My life has mostly been a quest for truth. A tale of research, philosophy, and questioning everything. At a very young age, I began asking the big questions: What is reality? Why are we here? I still vividly remember writing in my journal at the age of eight about how death was inevitable and how I couldn’t wait to experience it. My mother eventually found it. She was furious, scolding me and grounding me for “thinking too much.” I think my problem with sharing my ideas started right there.

Don’t get it twisted—she was heavily religious at the time. Eventually, she freed herself from it, and I consider that a victory. Religion, in my view, is a coping mechanism invented by early men to control others and guarantee obedience. There’s plenty of evidence for this—you just have to read the texts.

Back then, my mother believed the sole purpose of existence was to please a god who never answered her prayers. She went through life poor, miserable, beaten, and depressed, waiting for divine guidance. And, as you can imagine, it never came.

Through witnessing her suffering, I realized something crucial: if God exists, I cannot worship him. How could anyone worship a being who claims to be all-powerful, all-loving, while a ten-year-old child is sexually abused by a sibling and beaten by a parent figure? Life taught me that the only god that exists is yourself.

So, purpose? None—at least in any inherent sense. Life’s purpose is what you decide it is. Maybe we’re nothing more than cells reproducing. Maybe we’re part of the universe experiencing itself. The universe—vast, complex, and seemingly finite—was here before time as we know it. Could the universe be God? In a way, yes. God is just the name we gave the universe. The Big Bang kicked off time, planets formed, life emerged, and complexity evolved. That’s it.

What does this all mean? At the end of the day, you are a series of lucky variables that allowed life to appear. Maybe your “purpose” is just to exist, reproduce, and let the universe continue its course. Maybe that’s enough.

When it comes to empirical evidence, life has no predetermined purpose. And yes—I wrestle with this every day. Nihilism doesn’t make life easy. I’m painfully aware that I might just be cells fulfilling nature’s will. But I still want life to mean something. Most people misunderstand nihilism—they think it’s about giving up. But even in nihilism, I want to live. I just need a purpose to fuel the machine, to keep depression at bay, until I find it.