THE PURPOSE OF LIFE.

Have you ever woke up in the morning and asked the question “What is the purpose of my life?” If you are not already depressed enough, here I am to depress you more.

It’s a question which has startled scientists and philosophers for thousands of years. It’s a question that many of us want to know the answer to, and we all ponder about it spending sleepless nights.

But, what if the answer is already known to us? What if the answer is not as mysterious as you want it to be? What if the question itself is wrong?

I am one of those who sought to find the answer. Like almost everyone in today’s world I was brought up in a religious family and naturally I tried to find the answer through religion. It wasn’t too late for me to realize that religion has been misleading us for thousands of years (that’s a topic for another day!).

Then I turned to science. It seemed to know answers to the big questions. And here’s the answer it offers.

First some science -

There are roughly 100 billion galaxies in our universe and each galaxy roughly has 100 billion stars. Our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to have at least 100 billion planets. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Our earth is 4.6 billion years old. Life itself is about 3 billion years old. And humans have been around for 100 thousand years. There are roughly 8.5 million species on earth now and still counting. All life has evolved from a common ancestor through the process of natural selection. All the emotions that you have are nothing but mere chemical reactions in your body.

As the Nobel Prize winner, Mr. Francis Crick said: “you are nothing but a pack of neurons”.

These might all seem irrelevant but a closer look will enable your mind to see the truth. These are all facts that science has given in the last century. Science has answered more questions in the past 100 years than religion has in the last 10,000 years.

It must be quite clear by now that we are very insignificant in this humongous universe. One might find it depressing in the beginning but when you look at the calculations of how rare it is to be alive and how rare it is to be alive as a human, it’s really satisfying.

Have you ever stopped and considered the questions why do mountains exist? Why do clouds exist? One might give subjective answers like clouds are a part of water cycle or One might give the description containing physical conditions which lead to the formation of mountains and clouds but the question “why”  in the sense of a purpose is meaningless. If you toss a coin and the outcome is heads and you ask the question why did it turn out to be heads? One might answer it by explaining the physical conditions like the force applied, the mass distribution of the coin, the point of action of force etc but asking “why” as though heads had a purpose is a meaningless question. It doesn't matter to anything, what the outcome could possibly be. That’s the exact same mistake we make when we ask the question “what is the purpose of life?”.

We like to ask the question what is the purpose of life?  Because we ourselves are living creatures. Whereas inanimate things like clouds and mountains are hardly of any interest to us (at least to most of us). There is nothing but a tiny bit of personal bias in these cases.

Modern physics points to the direction that the laws of physics are an accident. The universe is an accident. Life is an accident and I think we can all agree that there is no purpose to an accident.           

-Ajet