What is the purpose of life? Why am I here? Why are we all here and what is the point of all this?
As a teenager, I often mulled over such questions as I struggled to make sense of the world we live in.
And why is there so much unfairness and inequality in this world? So much pain and suffering?
At the time the only ‘answers’ I could find to such questions came from religion, but digging deeper into such answers always left me dissatisfied. Each religion tells a completely different story and they all seem to require you to believe in things for which there seems to be no proof. Also, these stories are thousands of years old, which always made me wonder — have we not learned anything about these most meaningful questions since then?
I used to worry — “Will these questions ever really get answered? Wouldn’t it be sad if I live my entire life without knowing what its purpose was in the first place?”.
After years of being intellectually frustrated, I stumbled upon the truth about life and its purpose. I had almost given up on there being any answers when I found all the answers I needed and many more. These answers concluded what I thought would be a life-long quest and resolved my prolonged existential crisis. I knew then that at some point I had to share with others what I had learned so here we are.
This essay is for those who have at some point reflected on such questions but haven’t found satisfactory answers. In about an hour you will have the answers to these deep questions about life and its purpose and will come across insights about our existence that is sure to cause a radical paradigm shift in the way you see the world.
These answers have been out there for quite a while now. What kind of ‘answers’ are we talking about here? We are talking about answers that come from science, a discipline that preaches skepticism and demands proof.
Many believe that science doesn’t have answers to such questions about life and purpose. That is simply not true. You will see how the answers that science offers are incredibly powerful and make so much more sense than anything else out there. The problem so far has been that these answers are quite inaccessible to the layman as they are almost always written in overly academic language in books that span hundreds of pages. This is an attempt to solve that problem by writing a piece that is short and simplified.
Some of the biggest answers came in 1859 when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution. But we only began to realise some much deeper implications of his theory in the 1990s, when a new field called ‘evolutionary psychology’ emerged. Evolutionary psychology is a discipline dedicated to understanding how our minds are shaped by evolution. When we look at our mind and our behaviour as products of evolution, you start seeing things in a whole new light.
But how much light can science really shed when it comes to the purpose of life? I would go so far as to say that science has answered all there is to answer about the purpose of life — we already know all there is to know when it comes to life’s purpose, and there isn’t anything left to know about why we are all here and what the purpose of life is.
To understand the purpose of life, we must begin by understanding the process that gave birth to all of life — evolution.