I know that personal gain is not a goal in my life (what makes me happiest in life is only weakly correlated with my wealth, and there is a large number of diverse source of happiness so what is correlated with wealth is easily substitutable), or family (it seems fundamentally inefficient to put the energy of your life into sustaining a few individuals (children); and unless I find a great relationship (and there are an incredibly small number of these out there), I don’t think that my utility, short-term or long-term, is correlated with devotion to one person). Of course, a caveat here is that my ultimate goal may require wealth (which I can direct to fulfill my goal) but it will not be an end to itself.

I feel that I should make an impact. It’s unclear to me what it should be an impact on, but it seems that I should be able to substantially affect some non-local outcome. I don’t think I want fame (although I haven’t introspected into it yet).

I think that if I take the all-unifying and fundamental-seeking approach to finding my life’s purpose, I will determine that I should aid in the destruction of the universe. While this may sound funny, it’s not an “evil” thing per se; in fact, it can lead to what it commonly believed to be very “good” outcomes. For example, one corollary of this fact is that I should strive to enable mankind to progress on a large scale, where progress is defined as the ability to control (affect) an ever-increasing amount of space, and with it, energy.

I believe that there are two fundamental ways to enable such progress. We can discover a new way of harnessing, storing and transporting energy; or we can create conditions for someone else to do this for us. The latter can be achieved, for example, by producing machine intelligence, devoid of the biological constraints (of speed, capacity, and bootstrapping).

Some of the principles that can lead me:

• Your life has to include a large amount of consumption. Take in information, experience new things, let your senses develop
• On the other hand, you have to look within. Process information, unify concepts, draw conclusions
• You have to learn how to create something lasting, since your life’s purpose will most definitely require such a thing
• You also have to learn how to strive for something (follow through on goals). The best way to do this is to start small and gather inner strength through small successes, as well as improve on weaknesses through feedback on failures
• Remember that your philosophy may change over time. Instead of fighting this motion, embrace it. Prepare yourself for making decisions late. Be flexible. Refactoring is cheap

My immediate goal is to infer from within (by consolidating information, reaching out to fundamentals, logic and first principles) and from without (by observing the Universe that surrounds me) my purpose in life and its consequences. There are several factors to this:

• Feed your senses (to observe better)
  • Cherish your friendships
  • Read books
  • Broaden my horizons of knowledge
  • Do things from my bucket list
• Think more (introspect better)
  • Have the time to think more (cleaner separation of work and life — and set aside time to just think)
  • Keep yourself honest about thinking (maintain a blog with your thoughts — this allows others to provide feedback, and clarifies your thoughts)
  • Improve the quality of thought — lead a healthy life, free of anxiety and waste
• Make something lasting and be creative
• Improve my follow-through by focusing on something and achieving it well.
  • Be in a great physical condition
  • Present yourself better
  • Lead, design and execute better
  • Do weekend miniprojects
• Figure out your purpose

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 17:25 and is filed under principles, purpose, retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.