The Meaning Of Life

What is the meaning of life?

The meaning of life is to look at yourself, honestly, with no excuses or blindspots, and work on your weaknesses until you are at peace with your reflection.

For me, the meaning of life is to evolve spiritually. I take every interaction, good or bad, as a learning experience and reflect on my gut reactions to see where my biases originate and whether or not I truly agree with that reaction.

That’s vague. I know. But I follow the same 5-step process in nearly every situation:

[Interaction]
Step 1: Identify the high-level cause of your reaction (Surface Cause)
Step 2: Identify the bias of thought that makes you feel that way (Assumptions)
Step 3: Identify the emotional urge supporting those assumptions, the root cause of your belief that your reaction was based on (Emotional Root)
Step 4: Is that who you want to be? (Evaluate)
Step 5: Be willing to change your core beliefs to align with the person you truly want to be (Change)

Example: I had a disagreement with a housemate over something house related. My instinctual reaction was fury. All consuming righteous anger. Because I believed that I was right, that I had been wronged, and that it was outrageous that anyone would think otherwise.

(Surface Cause)
Once I calmed down, I took some time to think about why I got so upset and realized I felt that my rights to the space we share had been disrespected and that hurt my feelings. This was the first layer of cause just below my reaction.

(Assumptions)
When I looked deeper, I saw that I had also been in the wrong. I had made several assumptions on how we should share the space based on my past experiences with housemates. I had also acted thoughtlessly. I was so convinced that my way was right it didn’t occur to me that my housemate might feel differently. These are the surface biases — the factual trail I can trace through my memory to identify where an assumption came from.

(Emotional Urge)
The assumptions I had made were rooted in my belief that my way of thought was superior — a.k.a. pride.

(Evaluate)
Now that I’ve identified the root of my actions I can evaluate and decide if that base creature is who I really am. And if it is, then is that who I want to be? In the cases where I do agree with the root I have uncovered, (which are less common) I move the evaluation up the step-by-step process in reverse order until I find something I don’t agree with.

(Change)
In this example, I know I have a tendency to be prideful. I also know that is not a trait I value and it is not who I want to be. Once I understood my reaction, my anger went away because it was no longer supported by this tower of self-righteous thought (surface cause—assumptions—emotion—root).

This is not an easy process.

It is difficult to admit when I’ve been wrong.

It takes a willingness to be humble with myself and admit that I make mistakes and that my feelings, reactions, thoughts, and actions are not always justified.

It is my responsibility to understand my true motivations so that I can confront my deep-seated weaknesses. If those pieces of me do not complement the person that I want to be, I need to let them go.

You can’t let go of something if you don’t know what you’re holding, which is why I go through this process multiple times a day.

The purpose of life is to improve yourself. To be kind. To be thoughtful. To be understanding.

This post is a response to a question posed in the comments of my first article Human Being Extraordinaire, An Introduction by archive.xyz. Thank you for the idea!

If you have a philosophical question, post it in the comments and I'll write an article in response!