What is life FOR?

Written By Gugu Bengu

I feel like, as humanity, we don’t really know what life is for. If we did, we’d do a better job of living it and ensuring our experience of it is much more enjoyable.

Once you’re born, you’re mostly just trying to survive. Sure, we create all kinds of paths that help us feel we’re ‘doing something' with our lives. But what would we be like if we actually knew what it is supposed to be for? If we understood what a human lifetime is FOR? Why we exist?

If people having kids knew why they were bringing more people into existence, they would orient their children better.

I know that’s not going to be a popular statement. But I have never heard anyone give a reason to have children that didn’t have selfishness as a root cause. Not one of the reasons I’ve heard actually thinks about what’s best for this incoming human being. Why would they want to come here when we ourselves haven’t figured it out?

As it is, we manufacture life goals to distract ourselves from the misery, to give us a reason to stay alive, or to simply numb ourselves until ‘the whole sorry episode’ is done. It’s as if, as a species, we’ve spent eons getting to this point—Homo sapiens. Now that we have finally achieved ‘the heights’ we dreamed of, we just don’t know what to do with it!

What’s the point of all this self-awareness and intelligence if all it does is make us aware of the emptiness of existence?

I think we’re missing something. Something huge. We assume there’s no real answer to the question: what is life for?

I don’t profess to have the answer, but some time contemplating this question has led me to something that feels right to my questioning mind and exhausted body. It’s only a beginning, a start…

I am alive to experience life. That’s all there is to it. The great news is that I am equipped to make it an amazing experience… or hell on earth.

“Enrichment means to suck the marrow out of life… it means you find wonder where others find monotony and you find beauty where others see ugliness.”

— Richard Rudd

If I learn how to take care of my physical and emotional needs, and how to participate in relationships—with other people, Earth’s creatures, the soil, the vegetation, the sea, sky, and stars—if I do this right, I get to live for joy."

This wonder then moves me to create any and all things, led by my curiosity. These things I create add not only to my own enjoyment but also to the joy of those around me. So, my entire life experience then becomes continuous, collective enrichment.

Now that’s a life worth living! It starts with me. And it can start today. It’s my choice.

So, while life itself remains without meaning, the experience of life—the brief period that I get to experience myself as an individuated self—becomes a celebration of human consciousness, a period of play under the sun.

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