All the time, in everything we do or read or think about, the big question “so what?” comes up, or should come up. Upon analysis, motivation should be one of the first things considered as a separated aspect of a thought or deed. What importance does an action have without the knowledge of its intended purpose? Some would argue that the intended purpose holds no importance seeing as it changes nothing physically in the world, meaning that if I were to kick my neighbor it wouldn’t matter why I did it whether for malice or justice or whatever other reason. The facts are that I kicked him and he now has a sore shin. While this view is a completely correct way to look at things it definitely isn’t the only way. Then there is the counter argument which would be that the intent or purpose holds all the importance of an action. Intentions reveal character and depth that an aloof observer exclusively of actions can never see. Personally I find myself on the moderate side of purpose being important.

I’ve focussed on actions being the subject of this question of intentions versus facts but as I said at the beginning things like movies and literature are applicable to this discussion as well. Just as one may ask “why?” to an action for more enlightenment, the purpose of a story or movie reveals so much more depth to the otherwise cut and dried observance of what characters do and how the other characters react and so on. Without that purpose those venues dry up and become boring and stale. Thus its easier to see the need for purpose through methods of entertainment than through the previous focus of day to day actions. The real point of this entry though (the purpose, if you will) is to approach a combination of both real-life actions and stories; life. That’s right, the purpose of life.

Everyone ponders this every now and again and over the years I’ve come up with my own thoughts on how I feel I should live and why being alive is worth its struggles to me. It’s easy to see why purpose is integral to people enjoying their lives when looking at that first example of how actions can just be actions. Actions in the light of one’s life seem ultimately empty without a reason for doing them. It’s conceivable to think that one would view the lives of others as factual happenings with the only purpose therein being seen in the actual effects of their actual actions, but when it comes to themselves, humans need to believe that there is some point or goal to what they’re doing.

While a personal credo is a completely sufficient self discovery to establish purpose, many people either don’t stop there or they don’t take the time to think about it themselves and merely subscribe to someone else’s views. This happens when people try to establish a purpose of life that not only works for themselves, but for everyone else in the world. These general sets of values and goals are often both categorized as religions and imposed upon other people. This should be obvious though, the only surprising element of that conclusion being the elementary steps that were taken to conclude it. I of course wouldn’t go on to say anything against many religions’ claims to be the one true religion, but who’d have thought religion could be so simple? Just differing ideas on how to live and think.

The spark that ignited this topic in my mind came from the conclusion of an essay I found last year that was quite brilliant called “The Meaning and Value of Death” by Ira Byock. In that essay, Byock concluded that through all his research and all his years of observation the meaning and value of death comes from the intentions of the individual. This means that there is no universal meaning or value in death, only the unique meaning that one creates for it. Sure there are plenty of cultural traditions surrounding death that many groups of people all subscribe to together, but the key is in the subscription; each person had to choose for themselves what death meant to them because belief is a choice. So even in the midst of well-accepted long-lived ideas, they are just that with nothing more correct about them than anything you could come up with and believe.

Now coming back to the living, I’m going to make a stab at what I think about the meaning of life; we make our own meaning in death, and we make our own meaning in life. Just like people get into groups and subscribe to sets of beliefs about death, they do the exact same for life. Lots of people thinking the same thing doesn’t make their thoughts any more true than anyone else’s. It gives their ideas more clout, especially in governing, but who’s to say they’ve got it right just because they’ve got lots of people to believe it? Until God announces one correct meaning and purpose of life, I have to conclude that we create our own meaning, and only then because God would be the only one I could trust to know me perfectly better than myself.