Why are we here?

Alright, so making decisions is hard, ignorance is bliss and thinking too much and having too much choices makes it even harder to decide.

The question, and real art is how to decide. To take a decision you must know what you want, what is your goal. Without a goal whatever you choose is pointless. A decision in itself must bring you closer to a goal.

Above: Unrelated photo of sunset taken out of my window in Arnhem

Therefore the art is to find out what you truly want or convince yourself that you want something, to set your goals. This is, probably, the most difficult thing you will ever do in you life. For me it still is. And I haven’t gotten there and I will probably never find an answer.

But it all gravitates around the question – why are we here, what is the purpose of life and what makes us happy.

Humans are mammals, animals, therefore the need to reproduce and find a partner cannot be taken out the picture but we have to go beyond that and figure out what else is there to life? What can we do to be happy?

Well, it turns out that happiness has two sides:

• being happy in you life (the present)
• being happy with you life (the past)

We might be happy now but we might be unhappy with how we lived our life.

I’m not smart enough to figure this out all by myself so watch this talk by Daniel Kahneman. Make sure to watch the very end too (around minute 18), when he talks about money and happiness.

So we need to figure out a way to be happy with our present and to fill in our brains with enough pleasant memories to feel good about our life. Family and friends are both present and past, they bring both strong experiences and enjoyable moments. Work, on the other hand, is what our present is mostly filled with. And new things we try and do might not be the most interesting or enjoyable thing in the present but these make a big part of our memories.

working with these three things will fix the following:

• We are social animals and we need to love and to be loved, so learning to enjoy spending time with you parents, brothers, friends, parents is very important. Even if you don’t see eye to eye you must find a way to enjoy being around people you care about and who care about you
• Work takes up most of our time. If we hate what we are doing, something is wrong. We either are not doing what we are supposed to do or we fail to set our expectations and experiences to such a level that we will actually enjoy ourselves at what we are doing. Seth Godin make some very good points of how important is to emotionally invest in your work, but not in the way of going mad and yelling at your boss or coworkers, but in the way of relating to your coworkers and learning how to enjoy being around them. I recommend Seth’s book Linchpin, Read it, it’s worth doing it.
• When I’m in doubt about doing something or not I guide myself by the principle “better sorry about doing something than being sorry you never did it”. It is very difficult to get yourself moving, you are tired, it’s never the right time, it might be raining, but if you have to choose between sitting on the couch and experiencing something new never, ever choose the sitting on the couch.

In short these are the 3 things I believe that mix together into the magic thing that is the purpose of life. We have to reproduce, because we are mammals and our instincts tell us that we have to do with and we are rewarded with having to grow those extraordinary little things called babies. We must love our loved ones. We must learn to know how to make out of work an enjoyable challenge, not a job and we must learn how to never say no to new challenges.

In my next posts I will focus on the last two points, on how we can figure out what to do and how I approach new challenges and opportunities that come along the way.

I challenge you to tell me where you think I’m wrong, to tell me what is your secret mix that gives you the purpose of life, to rant, to cheer and to read on!

Before I end this post here are a few TED talks about happiness which are more than interesting and a real food for thought. They will make you think about what experiences make you happy and not and how too many options can make you unhappy.

Dan Gilbert: Why are we happy? Why aren’t we happy?