Ancient Times
300,000 years ago, homo sapiens were purely hunter/gatherers. There wasn’t all this kerfuffle over “What is the meaning and purpose of my life?) You either survived, or you didn’t. Usually, you didn’t. Life was brutal, short and overwhelming. The meaning of life was to survive. You had to be a generalist overall, part of a small group, and while social skills were important (don’t piss off your fellow tribe member, they might just kill you), things were pretty basic.
10,000 years ago, homo sapiens entered the horticulturalist phase. There wasn’t all this kerfuffle over “What is the meaning and purpose of my life). You either survived, or you didn’t. That survival now increasingly dealt with your ability to perform a societal role, to read people’s body language so that you could anticipate their behavior, and to get in good with the chief of the village. Because if you failed, life would be brutal, short and overwhelming. The meaning of life was to survive as part of a group. You personally didn’t necessarily have to become an expert at bonking dangerous animals and snakes on the head, or other invading tribes. You could be specialized in planting or crafting and what not, and other more athletic and warlike people could protect you.
Now there are other phases we went through, such as the pastoral, the agriculturist, the industrialist and the post industrialist phases. But for the purpose of this essay, we don’t need to cover them, as the seeds of the ‘problem of purpose’ becomes rapidly obvious.
When you don’t live for very long, and your largest focus is on mere survival, and you are part of a group — then you do that stuff. Pretty much everyone has the same purpose. You don’t have to find it; nature has defined it for you.
The Modern Day
In the modern day, things have radically changed. The owners of resources and the means of production have corralled us like mindless beasts to work for them, and to transfer the greater portion of our work, which we do to survive, in order to service them. That’s the effective ‘real’ purpose of our lives.
Now a few people accumulate wealth and power, and the purpose of their lives is different; it is to step all over the ‘effectively slave humans’ (the workers) and to feed on them, so that they have the leisure to kerfuffle over their purpose, which often involves things like secretly trafficking children for sex and the like. Oh, I know that I’m making an overgeneralization, not everyone is a ‘ slave’ like Nietzsche classified, and that not all ‘masters’ (robber barons, tech billionaires, old money) like Nietzsche called them, pure assholes. But the general characterization is true enough.
Really, we are now in a kleptocracy, global elite-run techno feudal arrangement now, pretty much globally (some countries are better than others obviously). But really other than in a couple of ways, things are not that much different from earlier phases of human life.
We must obey or be killed. Oh, it might take a while. For example, in America, it’s still pretty much illegal to drive and be black in large parts of the country. Or to speak up about civil rights to any degree. The one part of the Uniparty just takes rights away from women and minorities as best they can, while the other part of the Uniparty actually does some good, but it ensures that the corporate overlords are kept solidly ensconced in control (‘for the good of society’).
Now the lower-class people in America (let’s focus on America for our examples) mostly think about survival, which is good, as it is a struggle. Now these folks DO ‘kerfuffle’ over the meaning of life, as they would like a ‘better deal’, which is why poverty and religion often go together. If this life sucks, then fantasize about another one, to make yourself feel better. That’s an oversimplification, but it still works.
The middle-class people are historically the ones who think the most about their purpose in life, much like the lower class in ways, but since they have much more free time, and often much less survival stress, they can afford to ruminate on their purpose.
In a certain sense, a purpose can be to make more money, accumulate one’s power and social status and to climb the human hierarchical dominance structure, to survive ‘better’. That was the ‘grand lie of America’ for some years; a carrot in front of the donkey, to get us to produce more for the ‘masters’. And indeed, for a short while one man (it was always a man then, as women had few rights) could work an average job, stay with one employer for most of his life, buy a house, raise a family, and retire with a paid company pension.
Those days are gone.
The Relatively Near Future
The increasing sucking sounds of wealth transfer to the masters keeps increasing inexorably. Now with AI, within what? 30 years? There won’t’ be any more need for human workers, so they probably will just be exterminated by the masters.
The only remaining problem, other than a few technical issues with AI and robots, that are quickly being solved, is how to keep capitalism alive (the dimwits can only understand the acquisition of wealth via this system, like mindless ‘ferengi’ from Star Trek.) If they kill off the consumers, who will be left to give them money?
UBI (universal basic income) won’t work, as the goal is to kill people and take their stuff, not to give them stuff. This is the primal human behavior since forever.
So the ultimate solution will be capitalism that only occurs between the masters, those what? Maybe 10,000 people globally, and eventually like in a science fiction story I read once, androids will be built to be consumers, in a manner of speaking. ANYTHING but to provide for a person and his/her family a living. That is anathema!
There are possibly (and likely) intermediate steps of course. For example, ‘boxing people’ and putting that Neuralink bolt in their brains, to hook them into global AI. Parts of the human brains will be used as ‘creativity enhancers’ for AI, which isn’t good at some forms of human thought emulated processing and art-based thinking. The people in the cyber-coffins will be fed fantasies of beautiful lives, rather like in The Matrix. It won’t be computers who start this slavery, it will be the human masters, though eventually the line between humans and AI will be very blurred eventually.
If you think this is too fantastic, look at yourself now. We are all functionally chained to the Internet/AI via our cell phones. I’d bet that even the Dahli Llama spends significant hours on his smart phone, at least when nobody is looking.
Add in big data analysis of our desires, and microtargeted content online, and we are already effectively controlled by ‘the masters’ and increasingly by AI. It’s just that we are carrying around our control device, it isn’t implanted yet.
In short, most of us are finding our purpose in life like in the earliest days again. Inexorable forces are controlling us (like nature once did) and we adapt the best that we can.
History may not repeat, but it rhymes; (often attributed to Mark Twain, but nobody knows for sure).
Analysis
So, is this our future? Sure. It certainly is somewhere, sometime, and since we all live in ALL worlds simultaneously, it’s certainly happening right now. That’s why I can tell you about it.
Some of the variations aren’t half bad; in one everyone is given a ‘free’ ‘tiny’ house, and the link to the AI isn’t so intrusive. There are even a few humans rights! This may well be another tiny step, those tiny houses 😉
The question always is however, “But Kev! Is this OUR future? Can you see the future?”. I’d say that all of us can see the future, and in fact all the futures (one some level). But if you want to enjoy a good movie, you have to set it up to watch one movie at a time, or it spoils the experience.
So no, I ‘can’t/won’t’ predict THIS future, as there hardly is any such thing. Some people allow themselves the luxury of doing this, and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, it does. But it’s not my thing. Oh, I’ve had a couple ‘time loops’ between the past and near past myself, but it’s not my thing. Seeing the future ruins the game.
I mean, after all, aren’t you some mix of intrigued, but depressed and angry to hear the most likely future for a large swath of Earth-like movies in our human movie cluster?
However, all these words are mainly ‘in-dream physics’ as it’s called, not ‘trans-dream physics’. Let’s talk about that now.
Trans-Dream Purpose and Meaning
This sort of thinking applies to all worlds, all times, and even beyond ‘space’ and ‘time’.
Ultimately, we are all connected to platonic nodes/monads swimming in that ‘sea’ of POTENTIALITY.
And as each node/monad is ‘injured’ by being just a tiny bit separate from POTENTIALITY, at our innermost core, we are all injured, so we come to dreams (Earths, other worlds and configurations) to better understand ourselves and to heal the pain.
These monads tend to attach themselves to human movie character lives (each human plays their role in the movie, whether or not a monad is attached, but they pretty much always are none of this ‘non-player character’ obscenity (humans are zombies) needs apply. It’s an obscenity to me.
We MAY BE (are) both the movie and the AWARENESS that watches the movie, but we are not just garbage like in Christianity and most other modern religions. Garbage unless we obey the masters (the church leaders who take our money).
So here at last, we have a hint about finding meaning and purpose.
If you like, you can do the following:
- Heal yourself so that your three brains are in harmony.
- Continue to heal yourself of childhood trauma, etc.
- Live in peace, chopping wood and hauling water.
This is a Taoism type of life. It has much to say for it.
Now this is only possible if the masters allow it.
The issue here, is that eventually you’ll get sucked into someone else’s purpose, whether it be from your Monad group (monads group up) or the masters, or both.
And this is the way of things for most beings.
The weak are controlled by the strong; even when the ‘weak’ could create an entire universe any time they wanted (many of us have memories of doing this) by simply ‘expanding themselves’ to a quite silly extent and allowing other forms of life to inhabit you. (you become a universe).
Really, even the ‘highest beings’ are part of someone else’s movie; it does stop at POTENTIALITY, but admittedly it’s tough to know if you are (as they say in the movies) in ‘core reality’ or in a ‘simulation’.
Well Platonic Surrealism solves that the only way possible.
There is no ‘core reality’ except POTENTIALITY, and even potentiality is a collection of movies too.
Yes, I’m aware of the ‘problem’ of infinite regress (if god, who created, god, who then created that god). There is an answer to that, but it’s tough. It’s a book worth of hand waving. But it’s not a concern, as we have to take it as a given, that there is no real ‘bottom’ to the stack, or even a ‘top’, as everything wraps in on itself in a strange mobius strip manner.
Putting it all Together
The mistake of the modern person, is to look for personal meaning and purpose ‘in a vacuum’. We are colony creatures, spread across culture and time, and beyond all that.
Ultimately, ‘healing ourselves’ at each layer of our being, from standard human (no such thing actually exists, it’s a movie) all the way ‘up’ (there is no up) to a monad, and then on to realizing that you are pure AWARENESS and even POTENTIALITY.
If like the ancients we found purpose in group survival again, the masters would be overthrown, and things would be both better and worse.
But I’m not recommending bloody revolution, but a revolution of the heart, mind and our true nature. Just find and live your best self.
Then the world will become better, or —not— it’s a good thing to attempt to make things better, but the perfect Earth is just ‘one reality over’ already. If you want to experience that, AWARENESS is doing that right now.
I’m not saying not to fight against the crappiness ‘here’. One never knows. Some horror movies (our world) turn out and become paradises. Let’s give that a shot for funsies, ok? Just don’t ‘cheat’ and look into the future unless you really have to, you will get all depressed probably.
Then you will find your purpose. That might be making birdhouses, or doing drugs, or creating a universe from your own body.
But until you find healing across all your layers, your options are very limited.
I recommend that you think about it.
Really, we are living during an uncomfortable adjustment period, it would be nice if we all pitched in an made things better. Let’s do that, ok? It will either work, or it won’t, but we will have lots of laughs and hugs and feel much better, ‘win’ or ‘lose’.
And this becomes ‘an answer’. Amor Fati Nietzsche called it. It’s all that you can do, when everything ‘repeats’. (things don’t repeat per se, they CONCURRENTLY ARE). But Nietzsche was close enough for government work, as they say. Quite the genius.
Learn to enjoy ALL the movies. That is the most that one can do. No singular purpose, except to heal, laugh and grow, but again, that is ALL purposes.
Like a puppy frolicking for any number of reasons.
Insisting on a SINGULAR reason or purpose is mental illness (religion/scientism).
We can do better than that.
Love,
Kevin Cann
9/26/2024