6: Meaning of life? The frogs tell us!

We’ve chatted about damage being the opposite of love, and about love being a form of sacrifice in the pursuit of someone’s best interests. We’re building our bicycle of important ideas so we can ride into the sunset with it. The purpose of a human life is the front wheel!

This question usually gets a glib response – “What is the purpose of life?” a person asks. “Who can say? It must depend on each person,” replies one. “There’s no way to know”, says another. “There isn’t one”. Says a third.

Lazy! Questions tend to have answers. Especially in relation to purposes – everything living has a purpose. And, luckily, we’re not the only species on earth.

If I asked you: “What is X in the following sequence: 2, 4, 6, 8, X?”

You would say, " Well, I see that the values go up by two, so it must be 10.

You’d be right – and we often can use a pattern to answer an unknown. There was a game show like this where you had to guess what an image was based only on a few revealed areas of the picture. What fun!

So we can have the same fun with our purpose, in the same way. We notice that through the evolution of vertebrates, going from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds and (true) mammals, that as creatures increased in cerebral sophistication, they also increased in the amount of sacrifice (love) shown to their offspring.

This is quite general. What we mean is, if you threw a rock at a random fish, and also at a random amphibian (not a real rock, that seems mean), you’d find on average that the amphibian expended more energy than the fish on raising its young.

And, in the same vein, if you kept throwing your hypothetical rocks at a random reptile and a random bird, you’d find that the bird on balance was spending more of its energy raising the chick than the reptile was on its little reptilettes (note: this is not a word).

There are lots of examples that go against the grain here, but the point is, there is a grain. And the grain tells us that humans, as the most sophisticated of the creatures in evolution, have the purpose, therefore:

To show the most love (sacrifice the most) for the next generation of any creature on Earth

If it were a math equation, we would be at 100%, whereas some fishy creature simply spawns and swims off with 1% of love shown.

So there you have it! Our purpose is to show massive love to the next generation by making short-term sacrifices for them – not just our own biological children, but our whole community (we see that pack mammals eventually protect more than simply their own genetic offspring, so it would not be rational for us to be devolved in this sense).

This definition of our human purpose is buttressed by the common instinct to help, protect, and teach the young. Further, basically every major religion teaches that “love” is the answer (and, interestingly, the definition of love in religion is very close to what The Social Blueprint has independently concluded – sacrifice being a strong theme in religion).

This corroboration gives us comfort that we are on the right path to a unified theory of human nature. Check out the link below for more details!

Episode 6: Purpose of Life (TSB Chapter 7)