[This post is part of a series called Choose Your Life Purposes. If the issues addressed in these posts interest you, please consider becoming an Existential Wellness Coach. To learn more about our Existential Wellness Coach Certificate Program, please visit here. To preorder Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]

The more science taught us, the more we shrank in size—and shrank back in horror. You could build the largest particle accelerator the world had ever seen and recreate the Big Bang—and, psychologically speaking, end up with only more of nothing.

Even more of nothing. And this is where we are today. We had somehow wagered that well-stocked supermarkets and guaranteed elections would do the trick and protect us from the void. They haven’t. This we must now face.

This now shared certainty that we are throwaways has made life look completely unfunny. We can laugh and make small talk but in our private moments there is not that much laughter. There is only a deep, wide, abiding “Why bother?”

Here is the answer: while we are here, we have the self-obligation to bother and the self-obligation to act as if we matter, a mattering that includes acting ethically and putting the whole world on our shoulders. This is what existentialists call an “absurd conclusion.” It is “absurd” to care about life when life doesn’t care about us. But that is the right answer.

To accomplish this, you take as much control as possible of your thoughts, your attitudes, your moods, your behaviors, and your very orientation toward life and you make use of the freedom you possess in the service of what’s important to you. You attend to what is called “the project of your life.”

You identify your life purposes and you take responsibility for your life purpose choices. You deal with meaninglessness by making daily meaning investments and by seizing daily meaning opportunities. And you dismiss absurdity as true but irrelevant.

Like it or not, we have been forced into the role of steward and arbiter of our life. Surely no one asked for that. Who wouldn’t prefer an orgasm, a tidy income, a little selfishness, and another round of golf? Wouldn’t you? But is that what you want? Is there even an ounce of goodness in that picture?

And so, we try. We can’t escape our psychological subjectivity, as we are embedded inside of it. But we can wonder about our motives, we can make guesses about our intentions, and we can speculate about where we may be fooling ourselves. We can reflect. Inside of our cocoon of psychological subjectivity, a cocoon that makes it hard to see clearly, we can aspire to self-awareness.

We choose our life purposes and then we live our life purposes. This sounds obvious enough. If you knew what your life purposes were, surely you would want to then live them, yes? But even people who have a good sense of what their life purposes are have difficulty actually living them.

This is because tasks, chores, errands, and everything else is allowed to come first; because juggling multiple life purposes is difficult; and because living our life purposes requires rather more effort than, say, napping or turning on the television. But let us set the bar that high: we will live our life purposes!

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