The purpose of life

The purpose of life is to grow into the person you were meant to become. It involves continual learning, making mistakes, and evolving your values in response to feedback. I think developing oneself fully is the best way to contribute to society and the community that one finds himself or herself in. It’s important to discover your talents, whatever they may be, and nurture them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, it’s critical to be self-reliant and possess the capacity for independent thought–even if it veers from the people around you. That’s how we as humans make progress. We are not truly living unless we have both insight into who we are as individuals, and the courage to go after what we want in life.

Now, what I just described is a tall order. It is also a very Westernized form of thought. Thus, I don’t think nor do I expect everyone to live up to those standards. But then again, the average person, by definition, will live an average life, one full of regrets that he or she may not even be able to articulate. Yet, it’s important to consider that to live an extraordinary life, one has to endure some degree of discomfort in the form of loneliness, not as in lack of companionship, but in thought and attitude. As John Steinbeck wrote in East of Eden, “all great and precious things are lonely.”

All of that may sound a bit grim, but there’s also hope for people who aspire to be great and don’t want to feel lonely, and I think that hope is love. Love is such an abstract and multifaceted concept and comes in infinite forms that stretches beyond romantic love, what we typically think of when we think of love. I think love can be experienced in many forms if we open our minds to it. It can be expressed towards strangers in a day-to-day context. Love can be experienced in our careers, in our hobbies, in the arts, while playing sports, and in God. But all and all, I think the answer to the inevitable loneliness that comes with the pursuit of greatness is to be open to discovering *genuine* love in all its forms.