What if I said that your purpose in life is to make order in the universe?
In a very real sense, human beings are time-evolving patterns in the physical universe, and their “purpose” is to maintain local order (a functioning body) by ingesting molecules (food, air and water) and patching them into the otherwise degenerating system according to our plans (DNA, to a first approximation). All the rest of the stuff that we do is basically intended to make us better at this core activity.
That sounds kind of pointless, doesn’t it?
Yet it’s at the core of what drives us, this need to maintain our physical structures. But animals don’t just hang around waiting for things to come to them. They go out and find them. And then they figure out how to tell one another about it.
We are the kinds of consciousnesses that maintain our own order by trying to create it in larger and larger circles around ourselves. That starts out with “how do I get food?” but since we eventually need to be able to identify food/not-food, it becomes about the ways in which we identify food, and more and more complex social forms develop around food. So there are patterns in the “real world out there” (RWOT) and there are patterns in your mind/body that attempt to replicate those larger patterns in order to predict them.
Inner/Outer worlds
Once again, I posit the existence of a RWOT, and the simultaneous existence of myriad socially constructed shared models of the world… which are also part of that real world which you need to navigate. (With me, here?) No two of us contain precisely overlapping models/maps of reality, so our interactions with one another, and with the patterns are all points of seeking… and as we are known to have a confirmation bias, usually points of seeking verification of what we already believe. (That is, we seek to validate the part of our model which we think aligns with the part of the RWOT with which we are interacting.)
This is the point at which our inner and outer worlds collide. We don’t, in fact, experience the RWOT. We experience the model of it that is contained in our body/mind form. So we don’t experience money (for example), we experience our reactions to it. We don’t experience the kitchen with the knife out of place so much as we experience the story that “People should put things away.” Or, if we live alone, “Damn, if only I were more organized.” (Which, if we are masters of the art of self-negation, may spiral out of control to “If only I were a better person, oh my life sucks.”)
So we try to create an outer world that is predictable, in which the order is aligned with our inner model, and then we seek proof of that. And if our inner world contains a story about things going wrong, chaos and disorder, unpredictability, and unworthiness, this is the evidence we gather as we wander in the world. So it is not just the knife being in place, but the entire pattern about knives being in and out of place, what knives are for, how our kitchen is too small, our lives are too chaotic, our jobs suck, and if only we had done that different thing 15 years ago, we would have a perfect life in which we could always find our knives.
It’s too much.