What’s your Mission?

[GregorDeVillain]

SOMETHING BIGGER THAN YOU

Your cause must be bigger than you.

It must become so important to you that if you fail or die in the service of that cause, it is okay, so long as it advances that cause.

How do you choose a good cause? Here are the main things to look for:

Does this cause accomplish something concrete? What?

How will you know when the cause is accomplished?

What are the concrete actions you can take to advance this cause?

If any of your answers are vague, you’ve chosen a bad cause.

Here’s an example. Let’s say your “cause” is a political party. Any political party; it doesn’t matter which one.

For one thing, there is no point at which you can say, “We’ve won. Case closed. Pack your boots and go home, mission accomplished.”

For another, because there is no concrete objective other than, “Get more people voted into office,” it’s one that stretches on forever, never freeing you—people get voted in, then they get voted out, and you’ve got to go do it all over again.

On the contrary, you may instead say, “I’m going to get XYZ law passed, because this law is good for the people.” That is a good cause.

A purpose can be bigger than a cause. A purpose can be something like, “I will introduce hot pot restaurants to Western diners,” because you think hot pot is absolutely delicious, and most of the Westerners you know who’ve tried hot pot think it’s absolutely delicious, yet it’s nearly impossible to find hot pot restaurants anywhere in the West.

To advance that purpose though, you will need a cause you believe in too, like, “I will open up the first hot pot restaurant in Leeds.”

KNOWING WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO YOU

Beyond pure biological imperatives and emotional needs, you also have things that are important to you.

It might be that some teacher really turned you onto math when you were a child, when all your previous teachers had made math seem like the most horrifying subject there was. Now, you want to find a way to make math more appealing for school students too.

Or, it might be that you’re mortified at the fact that people can lose limbs or be disfigured in fire or chemical or other accidents and there’s nothing we can do about that except to offer them crude prosthetics, and you want to find a way to grow patients replacement parts using their own body cells.

Whatever it is, there’s some way you want to change the world and make it better, whether you know how to do it right now or not.

If you’re not sure what that is, here are some questions to ask:

What makes me angry that it’s so, that I think needs changing?

Is there a valid reason why things are this way—what is that reason?

At its most core, why are things the way they are, and how do I change that?

What you want to look for is structural problems, rather than people problems. People slip into whatever structure they’re presented with—if you spend your time getting mad at people for not doing what you think they should do, you’ll be wasting your time.

Instead, figure out why the current structure of rewards and incentives pushes them toward that behavior, whatever it is, and determine what would need to change in order to influence people to change their behavior.

In the math example, if you start scolding teachers for teaching math poorly and tell them to teach it well, you’ll accomplish nothing. That’s because the problem isn’t that teachers don’t like math; it’s that they don’t know how to teach math, and don’t have good tools to teach it with. That’s the cause you need to take up: teach teachers to teach math, or build tools teachers can use to teach math.

SETTING UP YOUR “PURPOSE TREE”

Once you have a big purpose like that you care about, you need to make sure it isn’t derailed by you neglecting your foundational purposes—things like food, drink, homeostasis, sex, the need for belonging, children (as you get older), stable relationships, or, conversely, adventure, thrills, change, and learning.

That means, make sure you handle your money and lifestyle, handle relationships and sex, plan for children at some point, even if you don’t want them now, and plan how you’re going to continue to grow and challenge yourself and learn.

If you address all of those, your reptilian and mammalian brains will leave you alone to bring your higher level logically-selected purpose to reality.

Personally, I’ve spent my life building up my skill levels in a variety of different areas and handling as many of my biological imperatives and emotional needs as I could, to free myself up for pursuing logical purposes later in life.

If you’re still young, unless you know exactly what purpose you’re after and you know how to integrate it with achieving your biological and emotional purposes (e.g., you’re building a business that’s achieving your purpose while also generating income, allowing you to travel, network, meet amazing people, take care of financial/​survival concerns, and have the free time and social circles to meet amazing women), I recommend taking some time to address your lower level concerns before you move onto your higher level ones so that you’ll be relatively free from distraction to pursue these.

BOILED DOWN TO BASICS

All right, this is a long one, there’s a lot in it, and if I’ve lost you in the woods somewhere along the way, that’s entirely my fault and not yours.

Here’s the nitty gritty.

The Meaning of Life: it’s unknowable. Anyone who presumes to tell you what it is, just go one level above the highest level they’ve reached, and you’ll have them stumped, flummoxed, and backpedaling. Don’t worry about it, because the very nature of life and existence makes it impossible to know in advance if your life will have meant everything or will have meant nothing. Only the end tells you that, and if there ever is an end you won’t know it, and if there never is an end you won’t live to see it even if you live forever because there is no “it” to see.

The Purpose of Life: boils down to escalating grades of importance:

Reproducing

Contributing to your family’s ongoing survival

Contributing to your city’s ongoing survival

Contributing to your nation’s ongoing survival

Contributing to the human species’s ongoing survival

Contributing to primates’ ongoing survival

Contributing to mammals’ ongoing survival

Contributing to animals’ ongoing survival

Contributing to Earth life’s ongoing survival

Contributing to all life’s ongoing survival

Contributing to the universe’s ongoing survival

… and on and up, quite possibly into infinity. It may be possible there is some upper defining limit to existence well beyond our universe, but I doubt if you or I will ever know what this is in our lifetimes if there is one.

To find your purpose, I advise you pick something on this list, and then I advise you to do your best to satisfy all purposes beneath your chosen level, as well as your chosen level. That way, should you fail at your chosen level, at least you have succeeded at other lower-level purposes.

You can always choose to ignore my advice here; I am rather risk-averse by nature. And you probably do stand a better chance of achieving a higher level purpose by ignoring all lower level purposes and directing the full brunt of your energies to just one place. It is, however, very risky, from a “fulfillment of your purpose” point of view.

The 3 Purpose Keys: are:

Biological imperatives

Emotional needs

Logical wants

Generally, the more basal purposes override the more recently evolved purposes, which means if your biology wants you to do something and your logic wants you to do something else, while your logic may win in the short term by tapping willpower, biology will eventually wear your logic out and in the long run find a way to win (often by commandeering your logic, interestingly enough—I can’t tell you how many of my friends who confidently told me they’d “never settle down” ended up settling down with some girl who was less than what they could’ve had in their primes because biology took over and now they try to logically justify their decision).

So, unless you want to spend all your willpower fighting yourself, find ways to tend to your biological and emotional purposes (not overindulge, mind you; tend to) before you delve into logical wants.

Selecting Your Purpose: ask yourself these questions:

What makes me angry that it’s so, that I think needs changing?

Is there a valid reason why things are this way—what is that reason?

At its most core, why are things the way they are, and how do I change that?

But do not blame people or try to change people themselves. Instead, look at the structure they live and work in that incentivizes them to act and behave and do things the way they do, and ask yourself how you can change things structurally to change those incentives.

Your purpose is effecting change in people. Your cause is effecting the structural change needed to achieve those changes.

You may also have purposes like, “Build better [whatever],” or, “Make it easier to [something].” Again, you’ll need specific causes like, “Figure out how to apply the [something] to [something else] to build my better [whatever],” in order to achieve progress in those purposes.

With purpose you can do great things. With purpose, you can inspire others to, too.

THE POINT

So, is there a point to it all? Was Ernest Becker’s contribution to our thinking about human psychology and “hero-systems” a valid immortality project—or will it be refuted in time, by future thinkers, and Becker himself forgotten? Will you or I or anyone else reading this have done meaningful things—or simply have wasted our time hubristically, thinking that what we did had some grander purpose when eight billion years from now some clumsy kid three universes up trips over the white hole containing our grandparent universe and kills the lights?

Well, some day when you die, either those beings of light are going to tell you what the meaning of it all is, or if there are no beings of light and they’re just an artefact of the dying brain, your brain will shut off and you won’t care anymore if there is or isn’t a meaning.

Death isn’t so far off for any of us—our lives are a lot shorter than they seem. A little time goes by, and poof—they’re gone.

Whether things mean something or they don’t, there are plenty of much more pressing things to worry about—because there’s always the chance that what you do does mean something.

And wouldn’t it be a tragedy if you missed out on doing something meaningful because you were stuck being indecisive about whether it meant anything or not?

Purpose is the trump card. Everything else being equal, purpose will propel you to success unimaginable without it.

[Kaj_Sotala]

Your cause must be bigger than you.

It must become so important to you that if you fail or die in the service of that cause, it is okay, so long as it advances that cause.

Why?

I feel like if I had to choose between

1. treating my foundational emotional needs as intrinsically important and living a happy and long life, versus

2. picking a cause that might get me killed and treating my foundational emotional needs as things that unfortunately need to be satisfied so that they don’t get in the way

Then #1 seems greatly preferable.

I’m not saying that I’d never be willing to die for a cause. Sure, if my death could somehow make the difference between us getting an AI that creates a utopia vs. an AI that just kills everyone, then I’ll consent to being killed. But even then I wouldn’t say that it’s “okay”, I’d say that it’s a terrible tragedy that someone needs to die for it and an option that I’d only pick because it was the least terrible option.

If one is actively looking for a cause that would make them willing to die, then that seems worse to me than looking for things that make them love life so much that they’ll want to live forever.

Generally, the more basal purposes override the more recently evolved purposes, which means if your biology wants you to do something and your logic wants you to do something else, while your logic may win in the short term by tapping willpower, biology will eventually wear your logic out and in the long run find a way to win

Note that this kind of “logic vs. biology” view is generally rejected by evolutionary biologists. Logic is a part of biology, and it’s not a question of our more “primitive” impulses overriding our more recent purposes. Rather both logical and emotional purposes have co-evolved, so that the brain will end up emphasizing logic-based decision-making in situations where it predicts that to be appropriate and non-logic-based decision-making in situations where it predicts that to be appropriate. E.g. Cesario et al. 2020:

The final—and most important—problem with this mistaken view is the implication that anatomical evolution proceeds in the same fashion as geological strata, with new layers added over existing ones. Instead, much evolutionary change consists of transforming existing parts. Bats’ wings are not new appendages; their forelimbs were transformed into wings through several intermediate steps. In the same way, the cortex is not an evolutionary novelty unique to humans, primates, or mammals; all vertebrates possess structures evolutionarily related to our cortex (Fig. 1d). In fact, the cortex may even predate vertebrates (Dugas-Ford, Rowell, & Ragsdale, 2012; Tomer, Denes, Tessmar-Raible, & Arendt, 2010). Researchers studying the evolution of vertebrate brains do debate which parts of the forebrain correspond to which others across vertebrates, but all operate from the premise that all vertebrates possess the same basic brain—and forebrain—regions.

Neurobiologists do not debate whether any cortical regions are evolutionarily newer in some mammals than others. To be clear, even the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with reason and action planning, is not a uniquely human structure. Although there is debate concerning the relative size of the prefrontal cortex in humans compared with nonhuman animals (Passingham & Smaers, 2014; Sherwood, Bauernfeind, Bianchi, Raghanti, & Hof, 2012; Teffer & Semendeferi, 2012), all mammals have a prefrontal cortex.

The notion of layers added to existing structures across evolutionary time as species became more complex is simply incorrect. The misconception stems from the work of Paul MacLean, who in the 1940s began to study the brain region he called the limbic system (MacLean, 1949). MacLean later proposed that humans possess a triune brain consisting of three large divisions that evolved sequentially: The oldest, the “reptilian complex,” controls basic functions such as movement and breathing; next, the limbic system controls emotional responses; and finally, the cerebral cortex controls language and reasoning (MacLean, 1973). MacLean’s ideas were already understood to be incorrect by the time he published his 1990 book (see Reiner, 1990, for a critique of MacLean, 1990). [...]

Framing willpower as long-term planning versus animalistic desires leads to the questionable conclusion that delaying gratification is not something other animals are capable of if other animals lack the evolutionarily newer neural structures required for rational long-term planning. Although certain aspects of willpower may be unique to humans, this framing misses the connection between willpower in humans and decision-making in nonhuman animals. All animals make decisions between actions that involve trade-offs in opportunity costs. In this way, the question of willpower is not “Why do people act sometimes like hedonic animals and sometimes like rational humans?” but instead, “What are the general principles by which animals make decisions about opportunity costs?” (Gintis, 2007; Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013; Monterosso & Luo, 2010).

In evolutionary biology and psychology, life-history theory describes broad principles concerning how all organisms make decisions about trade-offs that are consistent with reproductive success as the sole driver of evolutionary change (Daly & Wilson, 2005; Draper & Harpending, 1982). This approach asks how recurrent challenges adaptively shape decisions regarding opportunity trade-offs. For example, in reliable environments, waiting to eat a second marshmallow is likely to be beneficial. However, in environments in which rewards are uncertain, such as when experimenters are unreliable, eating the single marshmallow right away may be beneficial (Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin, 2013). Thus, impulsivity can be understood as an adaptive response to the contingencies present in an unstable environment rather than a moral failure in which animalistic drives overwhelm human rationality.