Human beings are story tellers. We learn new things well when they are tied to a story with some narrative structure (even if its the narrative of a historian or scientist). And all good narratives have some structure to them, a beginning a middle and an end. And by the time you reach the end, you expect there to have been some point for the telling of the story. Be it a lesson in heroism, or cowardice, love, respect, whatever. Stories are filled with the main character learning something important; the whole story is some narrative directed towards some purpose or purposes.
But when we turn this love affair of narrative on something that isn't actually written by any known author, we find ourselves quite rightly struggling to find some purpose above and beyond our own temporal ones.
The inescapable punchline is that there is no point, and our feelings that their should be are just our story-telling instincts kicking in. There is no point in my life any more than there is in the sun's 'life'. I just am, and there are certain consequences that arise because of that.
I can find reasons to take part in the struggle that is life, I can voluntarily adopt purposes as I will. But I can't make there be a point to life in general. There is no author.
But let's just say that there was one. Where is the point, then? Even if there were one, it seems mankind is powerless to discover it. And its certainly not established that all lives actually serve any particular point to whatever narrative goal (or otherwise) it's driving towards. One's purpose may simply be to work until you die so that the economy ticks over. That's it, the author needed a working economy and created a bunch of implied characters that were doing just that.
Of course, wrestling with the absence of any real point to any of this malarcky, has caused discomfort and upset to many - which is certainly not to be taken lightly. But as has been said elsewhere - once you realize there is no point, it then becomes up to you to make one. And that liberation is worth any existential horrors you might go through to get there.
™ Version 4.2
