Comment by smitty1e
3 months ago
> Most people judge themselves against a narrative that matters to them. Most people do not want to cast themselves as a villain in their story.
This is a reasonably assertion as far as it goes.
At the risk of being a dripping faucet, I'm poking at "Why?", given an inevitable return to the dust from which all came.
What's wrong with "because of social and evolutionary pressure"?
"Evolitionary" implies some direction and execution scope, does it not?
Possibly I'm guilty of over-reading the word.
How does extra scope (like an afterlife) solve the problem of purpose? Now you have two problems of purpose. If I remember rightly, C.S. Lewis in his sci-fi made heaven into an endless series of adventures, which is the minimum necessary to make it attractive. But this still doesn't resolve to an ultimate purpose any more than a finite life does.
Often the question "what is the purpose of my existence?" is a proxy for some less abstract question, I think. Consider Young Frankenstein, and the gag where characters sing "Oh, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you! At last, I know the secret of it all!" because they got sex. Less cynically, it may simply be a matter of identifying comfortable values, in terms of the possible values available in the human condition in the present day. I mean you're unlikely to be honestly asking a question with a giant universal scope, if you claim that it bothers you personally.
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Possibly you're over-reading, but definitely you didn't answer my question.
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