The Meaning of Life
The meaning of life always confuses us. In the beginning, when you have achieved a goal, the satisfaction that you feel might make you think that you have found the meaning of life. As time passes, you may no longer feel satisfied with your accomplishment and become filled with the desire to accomplish more. In the end, you may find yourself asking what the point of all that effort was, and come back around to the beginning and ask yourself again what the meaning of life is. If you have a clear answer to this question, you won’t feel depressed any more.
Question:
I want to find out the meaning of life in this world. I have been looking for the very purpose of my life every single day. I can breathe, walk, eat and sleep, and is this all there is to life? Sometimes I set a specific goal for myself, but as soon as I achieve it, I feel there’s no more meaning to my life and I need another goal. So I don’t know how to fulfill my life or what kind of goal would suit me. If the goal is too high, it may even throw my life into chaos. This is my question. Thank you.
Khenpo Sodargye:
Yeah, it’s a hard question. Sometimes I also have the same feeling. If a goal is too easy, we may not have too much chance to make progress. As your national anthem is Onward Singapore, in order to make progress, you may set a higher goal. Yet you may have to go through a certain amount of pain to reach a higher goal. From my point of view, if a goal is valuable and beneficial, you may set it higher, such as those things related to the purpose of life which is meaningful for your future life or for other aspects of your life.
You should evaluate whether your goal is valuable or not. For instance, suppose your goal is to be a teacher, it’s better to be an excellent teacher. That is what you should aim to achieve. Based on that, you can have an even higher goal and move forward toward it. However, if your aim is driven by personal desire and competition, it won’t bring benefits to the individual or society. Today, this kind of aim is quite common and I don’t think it needs to be very high, if you cannot completely go without it. Otherwise, during the process of satisfying your desires, you will probably lose yourself and cause harm to both self and others. It could happen like this. Therefore, we need to evaluate our aims with intelligence. Sometimes, you may think it is perfect for yourself, however, such an aim may have adverse effects on individuals and on our society in particular.
Indeed, it’s quite essential for each of us to develop altruism and to cultivate concern for the well-being of our society. Even if you don’t achieve your goal of benefiting others, your motivation and efforts would still have positive effects. This is very crucial. Nowadays many people only live for themselves. What are the life purposes of the majority? I always think the purposes of life can be classified into three types. Noble people live for benefiting society and helping others. Ordinary people live for their families and friends. The selfish ones can only live for themselves and care for themselves. So the purpose of life can vary from person to person.
