In every person, there’s a longing for a purpose. Without purpose, life becomes a chore and meaningless. If you’re walking through life without a compass or a north star, you have no purpose and you’re doomed to spend a lot of time thinking about “Your Grand Purpose” in life. Doomed because in the end you would keep coming back to the conclusion that there is NO “Grand Purpose”. The problem is, it doesn’t seem like a very convincing answer and it’s certain that most people don’t give up too easily and will keep searching for the answer. Some try to find it in Spirituality, some in God, others look for it in Philosophy.
A serious thinker wouldn’t just accept the dogmas, so he’s doomed to keep repeating “The Search”.
The only problem here is that, life is short and these kinds of questions that are highly subjective, never lead to a satisfying answer. The whole quest leads to a lot of wasted time and energy, just to come to a similar conclusion over and over again, an existential angst is inevitable for blokes and lassies who spend their days in such a meaningless pursuit.
I propose a set of axioms for life, like in mathematics which are considered to be fundamental facts which don’t need to be proved. A proved theorem is never proved again, it’s just used and referenced for solving future problems.
Why don’t we apply the same idea to our lives? Once we have gone through a sequence of thoughts to arrive at an answer for a general decision problem in life, why don’t we store it somewhere and don’t question it unless there’s a very serious counter-theory.
For example: You are out with your friends on a Friday night. If you’ve seen enough night outs with friends, you pretty much know that nothing good really happens after 12 am when you’re out with friends. Atleast 99% of the time nothing good happens if you’re still out. Either you’ll be drinking a lot or doing something crazy, or you’ll just sleep too late. All not so good things for you.
So a general axiom for such situation would be: Don’t drink too much and leave before 12 am if you’re out with your friends.
It will save you a lot of time and you won’t do too many stupid things. Ofc, doing stupid things is also important to learn from them, but there should be a point beyond which you just need to move ahead.