Last time I talked about some principles behind executing on goals. Our journey is not yet complete — since we still don’t know what our goals should be. So let’s travel upwards, determining what influences our goals, then what in turn influences that thing, and so on. Hopefully the framework is a finite one.

Our goals are influenced by our desires, our wants. At some level there isn’t much difference between goals and desires, except that desires may not necessarily be measurable. Desires are what makes our goals important: the goals then become a way to hold ourselves accountable for getting what we want.

This hasn’t made our search much easier, because we can still not know what our desires should be. At this point a lot of us have an intuitive understanding of our desires (“I want to be rich”, “I want to look good”, “I want to help starving children in Africa”, etc.) but I doubt many of us ask ourselves why this particular desire and not the other. This is particularly interesting as throughout our life our desires change.

I will single out one desire that a lot of people seem to have: happiness. I don’t like this word because it’s not very well-defined and, even worse, as one attempts to define it, one realizes that it’s self-referential (we want to be happy but ultimately we and only we decide if we’re happy). I will write more about happiness but I think fundamentally, happiness is linked very much with a concept of an afterlife (people who don’t believe in an afterlife want happiness in their life). If you think that you desire happiness, I’d encourage you to think why and what exactly you mean by this. Would you rather be content for all your life or unhappy for most of it and incredibly happy at the very end? Would you prefer to know more but be less happy, or be ignorant and happy? As you start asking yourself hard questions, I think you’ll realize that happiness is a kind of black hole that may actually be distracting from that ultimate question.

Our desires are influenced by our values. Everyone has a sense of values and based on these values we make decisions in life, specifically what we think is important, and hence what we want. Here some of us might value mankind, others may value freedom, others still may value human life (as in, an individual’s life).

Finally, our values are set by our purpose. I see the purpose as the singular value that we hold most dear, find most important. From the purpose we can derive all our values. Our purpose is usually also something that doesn’t change — once we figure it out in the first place, that is. This is also another reason why figuring out your purpose is incredibly important — the entire framework is a kind of a chaotic system where small changes to one layer can snowball into huge differences in the layers below. For example, if our values shift a little, our goals may be entirely different and so our actions will be nothing like what they were before (often they will be opposites) and they will permeate our lives. For example, if I start valuing quality relationships over their diversity, I may decide to stop commuting from the City and live in Connecticut instead.

Can we keep going? What influences our purpose? I think that we come up with our purpose based on our synthesis of our interpretation of the observable Universe. In other words, we absorb information through observation, analyze it, and find themes. As we continue synthesizing, we determine a very high-level model of the universe and with it, our place in it.

The reason this is a useful framework is that it is not infinite — you can’t ask “why” forever, because information is a fundamental phenomenon — we observe things about the universe, which we can treat as exogenous.

However, this doesn’t make thinking about purpose easy. You still have to take information in, and process it; find themes and reduce it to a model that you can reason about. You will likely encounter the metaphysical layer pretty quickly. While you may not be able to reason within that layer, you will probably be able to do some metareasoning.

Specifically, as you start asking yourself “what’s the point of all this that I see around me?”, you will have to answer an inconvenient question. I think I found a way to phrase it that gets to the bottom of a lot of the questions people have about the Universe. Do you believe in an afterlife which can be materially affected by the things you do in this life? (note that you may believe in an afterlife and still answer “No” to the above question!)

If you don’t, your purpose in life will naturally be larger than you — it will be about affecting the universe in a way that’s not simply localized to your life. For example, I believe, your purpose in life should not be to have a house, a well-paid job, and a family — these things affect mostly you and nothing else.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 23:59 and is filed under purpose. 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.