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[TamerVirus]

The plan is so mysterious that you ignoring the plan and doing whatever...is part of the plan!

[SalmonGod]

The plan is so mysterious that you ignoring the plan and doing whatever...is part of the plan!

Exactly.  In other words, it has no effect on my life, and does nothing to logically alleviate existential anxiety

[JoshuaFH]

I'm so the opposite of you guys on this point.  The idea of having some "purpose" that is imposed on me by the existence of a higher power sounds stifling.  I would naturally want to resist it.  And I don't understand what the difference would be between having a purpose granted to you by a deity vs any human being or organization imposing behavior on you.  I can work for a business that expects me to see my work for them as my purpose in life.  Their expectation doesn't invalidate my ability to decide for myself whether I want to fully absorb that, or continue to be an individual whose path and purpose are not synonymous with a corporate mission statement.  Same for being part of some god's plan.  If god's plan is some mysterious thing that is never communicated to me, then it doesn't even do any good.  The idea can be completely ignored.  It becomes his problem if he wants to handle it that way to see that I fit into his plan, as I go about my business oblivious as to whether I'm doing the right thing or not.  Telling me that I'm part of a plan but I don't need to know what it is is basically telling me I can do whatever I want.  So if that's how it is, how does believing whether a god exists even help?

It's definitely a moment of weakness on my part, of wanting a slave's happiness. That is, determining what my direction in life is, what I do from day to day, what is right or wrong, whether my life has value or not, all that is not in my hands anymore, a slave doesn't have to worry about it, their master does. It's the ultimate trade of freedom for security, and I suppose that really reflects badly on me for occasionally desiring it.

[SalmonGod]

Nah, I think everyone has those thoughts when they face difficult decisions they don't want to make.

[wierd]

Sometimes I wish I had it in me to be religious instead of atheistic.

isn't that just a choice though? Choosing whether to believe in a religion or not?

Not necessarily. If it's not something you believe, trying to pretend that you do just feels like lying to oneself.

I have echoed OP's sentiment on multiple occasions.  No, it's not a choice, any more than believing in Russel's Teapot (a teapot in solar orbit, too far from us to observe).  Or any of the other gods people have come up with.

If you see a hundred options and none of them make sense, it's not that you're choosing not to know the truth.  You're stuck with the horrifying reality that ultimate truth isn't evident, yet, to humanity.

Beholding a lack of purpose is not a survival trait, and coincidentally, it's something we're ill-equipped for.

I would argue that the need for a purpose is a result of human social engineering, not evolution.  Humans don't have nor need a purpose to be, except in the eyes of other humans.  EG, "that is a plumber", or "that is a doctor."

We ascribe value to having a purpose, and consider such people to be more valued than people who are aimless, or buck society to do their own things. As such, we are socially programmed to be afraid of being without purpose, or having our purpose rendered obsolete.

Humanity *NEEDS* to wake up from that though, because before too long, 90+% of the population will have obsoleted purposes.

[JoshuaFH]

What is the actual alternative Wierd? Hedonism? What you said sounds to me to be a pessimistic prediction of a dystopia that I don't want to live in. I simply don't believe for a second that humans are special creatures, they're biological machines, and a prerequisite for their internal programming is a sense of purpose in life, even if it's something asinine, they need it.

So the reality that humanity is careening towards, I feel, is not that humans need to adapt to being purposeless because machines and conveniences are obsoleting every essential job humans used to do, but rather that humanity is obsoleting themselves period and the next task is deciding who our "descendant race" will be: highly advanced robots, another possibly human-like genetically altered species, or something else. Now, whether or not that's a good or bad thing is another discussion.

[wierd]

See Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

Specifically, "Self actualization".  When you define yourself based on society's demands, rather than your own personal growth as an individual, you are not reaching the top of the pyramid.  This is especially true when your identity revolves around your work, which is performed to sustain the self, not to become the self.  People are more than their jobs.

In the near future, the need for human labor is expected to drop precipitously. Many people who define themselves by their work, will be left with nothing to define themselves, because their work will be obsolete.  It will be a very difficult time for human society, and society needs to wake up to this, and stop sending dangerous messages that you are only as valuable as your work.

[SalmonGod]

My purpose in life is to experience it.  This is why having a singular purpose in task form imposed on me (like being stuck working a job for most of my waking hours) pisses me off so much.  It limits my ability to experience life.  Simply witnessing - absorbing oneself, the world, and its other inhabitants is its own self-contained purpose, the way I see it.

We don't need to give birth to a descendant race.  We just need to free ourselves to be able to travel, think, read, listen, learn, develop skills and relationships, etc.  To seek fulfillment in continually deepening our personal being.

[wierd]

Bingo.  People have forgotten how to do this. ^^

[SalmonGod]

If you view the universe as absent a higher consciousness, our existence as sentient beings becomes the thing that gives the universe meaning.  Without witness, objective reality is only chaos lacking context and ultimately value.  The relativity that comes from experience from within a frame of reference is what causes things as we conceptualize them to exist.  The way I see it, that's plenty reason for being to be its own purpose.

[wierd]

Even with higher purpose (I will pick on Christianity here, but similar arguments can be made for basically any religion), why does an all powerful god consider human minds/souls to be of such extreme intrinsic value, over say-- a cat, or a camel?   After all, if we ascribe to the internal logic there, this being created all these things, and could conceivably create more at will, making their value rather limited, no?  More specifically, what does this god intend to do with you (or rather, what do you think you will be doing) when you get to this celestial heaven?  If you evaluate your worth, based on the value of your work-- the Christian heaven, with its palacial gardens, mansions, streets of gold, and angelic servants, will be an unendurable hell for you, as you will have no purpose other than mere ornamentation, no? Oh, what's that, you will seek some higher purpose after getting there?

Well, why not do that here on earth, hmm?

[scriver]

My purpose in life is to experience it.  This is why having a singular purpose in task form imposed on me (like being stuck working a job for most of my waking hours) pisses me off so much.  It limits my ability to experience life.

No, it doesn't. You wouldn't be experiencing a dyft more of life if you were having supersex with the three most beautiful people in the world while basejumping off the top of Mount Everest. You clearly don't think your purpose is "to experience life" or you wouldn't have any problem with how you live. Your purpose seems much more to be "to enjoy life", ie hedonism.

[JoshuaFH]

See Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

Specifically, "Self actualization".  When you define yourself based on society's demands, rather than your own personal growth as an individual, you are not reaching the top of the pyramid.  This is especially true when your identity revolves around your work, which is performed to sustain the self, not to become the self.  People are more than their jobs.

In the near future, the need for human labor is expected to drop precipitously. Many people who define themselves by their work, will be left with nothing to define themselves, because their work will be obsolete.  It will be a very difficult time for human society, and society needs to wake up to this, and stop sending dangerous messages that you are only as valuable as your work.

I think that is its own misunderstanding. The perception you have seems to be that employment is purely for sustenance and nothing else, that it is otherwise a waste of time, thought, and effort which could be better diverted towards selfish pursuits. I don't think this is the case, that a person needs their job for their own development just as much as the job needs them. That society is increasingly a pluralistic society, employment is increasingly the only means of interacting with and making a difference in the world. Employment is it's own method of self-improvement, and acts as a second community to the individual for social contact. There's an awful lot of people that hate their jobs, and would prefer to be doing anything else but are perhaps stuck in their lot in life at the moment, and I'm not trying to invalidate those feelings, God knows I'm chronically stifled in my job as well, but that seems to be the fault of the greater system at large, how it was unintelligibly grown laissez-faire rather than designed with the purpose and happiness of its inhabitants in mind, and how the only people who could have designed it did so poorly due to their own human inadequacies.

I think what you're looking for is some kind of a free post-scarcity society, which on its face looks ideal and utopian, but I think that that desire is itself shortsighted and would result in an existential crisis that would envelop the entire human race. The desire for ultimate freedom is impossible, humans' psychological trappings forbid it, to have perfect happiness and security is a dream that the human mind hasn't evolved to exist in. It's why I made a mention to a 'descendant race', because humans are remodeling their environment into a place where they both can't live, and they don't want to live, so the only alternative I can think of is to simply create new intelligent creatures to inhabit it and hand it off to them and allow normal humans to fade out of existence. That sounds kinda stupid and farsighted to the extreme, but the only other alternative I can think of is deliberately stifle, or even wind back technological progress, which is the death knell for our species and perhaps all life in totality.

[Mech#4]

This is all something in Star Trek, yes? In a post scarcity society people were becoming doctors, pilots and engineers not because it was a job but because they wanted to do that.

[SalmonGod]

My purpose in life is to experience it.  This is why having a singular purpose in task form imposed on me (like being stuck working a job for most of my waking hours) pisses me off so much.  It limits my ability to experience life.

No, it doesn't. You wouldn't be experiencing a dyft more of life if you were having supersex with the three most beautiful people in the world while basejumping off the top of Mount Everest. You clearly don't think your purpose is "to experience life" or you wouldn't have any problem with how you live. Your purpose seems much more to be "to enjoy life", ie hedonism.

I don't think that desiring freedom to pursue personal development by a variety of means is the same as hedonism.  Many of my most valued life experiences are not ones that I enjoyed.  Being a cog in an economic machine that spends its days turning the same way against the same adjacent gears is life experience, but in an extremely limited capacity.  You get so much out of it, and then it ceases to broaden your scope and capacity as a conscious being.