To understand the meaning of your life, we need to first understand the meaning of life. And to do that we first need to understand what is meant by life. Biologically speaking, you are a sentient being that is capable of imagining several different futures, and then choosing which behavior is most likely to make the best future come true. For example, let’s say you’re hungry. You want to eat something. You imagine several different scenarios. You could cook something to eat. You could order something and have it delivered. You could get into your car and drive to a specific place. You could get into your car and drive around until you found something decent. To quickly compare each imagined outcome based on three different criteria. How much you’d like it, the level of difficulty, and how likely it would be to actually happen. Of course, that last two are two sides of the same coin.
Something very easy to achieve is highly likely. Something difficult to achieve is unlikely. But not always. Walking two hours in the rain to your favorite restaurant is pretty difficult, but it’s likely to happen if you wanted to do that. Looking into your refrigerator and hoping the pizza fairy showed up while you were watching TV is pretty easy, but it’s also pretty unlikely. Because you are always in need of something, it could be said that you, as an entity, are a desire-fulfilling machine. If some kind of alien came down and observed you for a few weeks, they would conclude that your function is to satisfy your needs. So you might say that life, in general, is the combined efforts of various self-directed organisms to satisfy their own and each other’s needs. Your life, specifically, is the ongoing process of imagining and satisfying your own needs, using your skills and abilities as best you can.
Who are you?
So, who are you specifically? Beyond your name, and ancestry? Your body contains your muscles, bones, tissues and other biological entities that make up the physical you. Your mind contains your memories, dreams, desires, and collections of experiences. “You” is the sum total of all of these. The “You” who is reading this sentence is a different “You” that started reading this. Every time you interact with reality, which happens every second that you are alive, you are changed. Your memories are changed. Your experiences are changed. The “You” that thinks you would like to try some squid pizza is a completely different “You” that has already tried it, and a decided that you will never again make that mistake. One way to define “You” is that you are the ever present entity that is aware of what is happening to both the body “You” and the mind “You.”
Your History
What is your history? You came into this world utterly dependent on others. Slowly over the years, you became more and more self-reliant, and less reliant on others. When does that happen? When did you finally cast off dependency on others and become completely independent? In many ways, because we are social creatures, we will never be truly independent. If you lived on a huge island with plenty of resources, so you could get enough food, water, and shelter, life would be pretty limiting. You would be completely independent, but you would be pretty lonely. And you’d also be in big trouble if you cut yourself and got an infection!
Basics of Human Nature
No matter where you are in your life, you come pre-programmed with several instincts. These can be thought of as automatic desires that are always there, so you don’t have to remember to think about them. Imagine what would happen if you never got hungry, or never got thirsty, or never felt pain or fear. Chances are you wouldn’t last very long. All of these instincts have helped us survive for millions of years (before we were even humans), and we still have them, whether we like it or not. Understanding what these are will help us figure out how to use them as best we can, so we can get what we want.
Instincts as Prime Directives
Social Safety
We are social animals, so we are always going to be worried about our social safety. We will always be worried about what other people think about us. This cannot be ignored or disregarded any more than our hunger or a fear of falling off a cliff. Everybody feels this. Nobody likes the idea of our social peers talking about us behind our back. This concern for our social safety presents itself when we are asked to give a speech when we are in unfamiliar social situations, or we walk into a room and see people look at us and start whispering to each other.
Social Status
Assuming our social safety is not at risk, we will always want to increase our social status. In primitive humans, there was a direct correlation between high social status and mating. Meaning that those ancient cave guys and girls who had the highest social status got more mates and had more kids. Which meant those people that were best at getting high levels of social status throughout their lives had more kids that those who didn’t. Consequently, all of us today have it programmed into our genes to always want more social status. This can manifest itself in many ways, often times by being best at proclaiming that we specifically don’t want social status.
Food
Of course, we have to eat! So, we are always hungry! This is an easy way to think of all our other instincts that get in the way of the life we want. It’s not so great always being hungry when there are fast foods restaurants on every corner! Of course, our instinct to always be hungry, like all of our other instincts, helped us a lot in the past and gets in the way in modern society. And just like we can’t simply “release our need to eat,” we can’t very well “release” the impact of our other instincts, as much as we’d like to!
Reproduction
Once upon a time, there weren’t that many people on Earth. Now there’s over seven billion! Clearly, making copies of ourselves is something we are very good at! We all have an instinct to reproduce. (Or to do those activities that lead to reproduction, ahem.)
Savings – Planning For Future
This is one instinct that always gets overlooked, but it’s there. We all want to have a secret stash somewhere just in case. In fact, you can say that our bodies are so good at converting excess calories into long term storage (ahem) that we are programmed to save for the future! Of course, with the advent of modern economies, we can save in many ways. It feels better to have a fridge full of food than an empty one, even when you’re not hungry. It feels better to have a pocket full of money than a pocket full of lint. Having something saved up, “just in case,” feels a lot better than having nothing!
Exercise
Consider your main instincts of social safety, social status, food, and reproduction. Consider the actions you took today in light of these. What did you do or not do to satisfy these instincts?
