Children playing has got to be one of the greatest expressions of purposelessness that there is. It’s not that play has no purpose, it unequivocally does and the benefits of play have been scientifically proven time and time again. Yet children playing don’t do so for any greater purpose than play itself. Playing is the activity and play is the purpose, to a child there really isn’t anything more to it.
Adults have many activities that are just the same. Take music for example. The whole idea of listening to music isn’t for the purpose of getting to the end. It’s to listen to the music. Have you ever put a song on endless loop because you don’t want the experience of it to end? Although many emotions may stir up within us during the melody, and some music does try to represent something other than itself, ultimately there is no purpose in listening to music other than to experience it. As Alan Watts puts it, “the classical music… has no other meaning than its own sound” (Alan Watts, ‘Play and Survival’).
The rest of life doesn’t need to be any different. Defining a fixed purpose adds seriousness to life, rather than letting it flow like play. Life surely has a purpose, if it didn’t, I posit that we wouldn’t be here at all. Yet there is no reason to be overly concerned with knowing any purpose to life beyond living life itself.
In ‘The Purpose Driven Life’, Rick Warren says the purpose of life is to serve God. A common understanding of Buddhism is that the purpose of life is to alleviate suffering, and repeat life until reaching enlightenment. Religions generally revolve around some version of these two themes. Yet what is God’s purpose and what is the purpose (what happens) beyond enlightenment? The Buddha, as does Jesus, instructs us to not be concerned with these questions and just focus on the task at hand.
Ideology aside, in a psychological sense they hit the nail on the head. In many therapy sessions, my own psychologists have used reviewing the past or talking about the future merely to bring me to a place of accepting and seeing reality. That whatever has happened, already happened, and what is to come is not in my control. All I can do is focus on what is happening now.
So in this analysis, the purpose of life is serving some greater purpose that we will never know and never understand. Seeking to understand it, is a distraction from the task at hand: Living. In the same vein as play, living is the activity and life is the purpose. If one can accept that, without getting so caught up in needing to define a purpose for their life, to surrender to what is, one can just get on with experiencing life and the art of living.