Why Are We Doing This?

A reminder about PURPOSE, from my younger self.

I was looking through some old files today and came across a piece of journaling I did as a younger man (from about sixteen years ago) concerning something a lot of young men and women probably think about: finding a purpose for your life.

Normally I’d be embarrassed to share something from so long ago, but two things gave me pause as I read this.

One, unlike a lot of goofy ideas cooked up by my younger self, I really can’t say that I feel any different about this one today.

And two, lately I’ve been thinking about purpose. (Apparently, I’m not alone.)

What is our purpose here on Substack? What is it we’re trying to do? More broadly, what is the purpose of entering these squiggly little black lines onto screens and beaming them out across the ether in hopes that someone else will cast their eyes across them?

I believe a large part of the impetus to pick up pen or keyboard in the first place, for many writers anyway, is the feeling that we are misunderstood. That when speech or actions have failed to communicate what we really mean, that perhaps this one last resort, the act of spelling out exactly what we mean, line by bloody line, word by bloody word, will do the trick. There is an unavoidable precision to it. And frankly, a wee bit of manipulation. If I’m speaking, I have about 5-6 seconds to capture your interest before you can tune me out, or interrupt, or change the subject.

Writing, if it is good, grips you to my thoughts.

And if it is really good, keeps you to the end.

Perhaps even achieves a little spark of understanding between us.

This Substack began because we, all of us, went through a devastating period of being misunderstood. Our family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances underwent a near total brainwashing. It was awesome and terrifying to behold. Moreover, they were instructed to turn on us; to reject and vilify loved ones and anyone else who committed the sin of questioning.

Like never before, I felt the need to make my thoughts clear on a few subjects near and dear to my heart: science, critical thinking, skepticism, individual rights, freedom of speech, love and human connection. All of these beautiful concepts were (and still are) being perverted into ugly things in the public mind. I, and many others, felt called to defend them, if only so we could have something to point to when a brainwashed family member turned on us, and we could say: “please…  read this”.

The defense of these things is not easy. It involves marshaling evidence, data, facts, and presenting them in a persuasive manner. It involves complex arguments that cross over multiple fields: science, philosophy, logic, history, etc. It involves reading widely, thinking deeply, then somehow constructing it all into something coherent, and even entertaining, that will grip the reader’s attention for five or ten minutes.

But now, after all the data have been presented, the arguments made, the cases airtight, the complexity seems to have vanished, suddenly. The din has gone silent.

Now, we’re left with one simple, undeniable truth: Humanity is under attack.

That’s really it. Everything you read here and on related Substacks is an unveiling of this fact. We’re peeling away the veil strand by strand, like bandages from a botched surgery victim, and we’re horrified by what lies beneath.

There are a few, powerful  humans (“former” humans, we might call them) who have decided that to “save the world” they must bring about the end of our species, if not by utter eradication, then at least by transformation into… something. Something ugly and altered and enslaved. Something not us.

As Prof Sucharit Bakhdi put it: “the abolition of humanity in it’s current manifestation.”

The global totalitarian state has been the wet dream of every tribal chieftain, warlord, king, emperor, and dictator that ever lived. Now, in our time, they’ve decided they finally have the technological means to see it done. And rather than round us up by direct force, they’re attempting to make us, through trickery and propaganda, in the name of “safety” and “convenience”, march into our own prisons.

Some writers are still focused on all things pandemic, and that’s fine. It was the single greatest attack so far on humanity, and we should still discuss it. But this, as I see it, is where we’re at:

We’re in a battle for the species. Nothing less.

And every one of us will be called to this battle, before it’s over.

So really, what is it we are doing here? Have we been conveniently tucked into an echo chamber, while the rest of society marches right along into dystopian nightmare? Or are we reaching people? Are we opening eyes, changing hearts and minds?

Does it matter?

It feels like my younger self reached out to me today, and said: Stay the course, Bro. It matters.

Here’s what my sixteen-years-ago self had to say on the matter of being called to your purpose:

PURPOSE

Do our lives even have a purpose?

Well, what do you mean by ‘purpose’? If you mean, “as decreed by a supernatural force”, or by society, then no, I believe purpose is something more personal than that.

Does human life require a purpose, as a necessity? No, you can survive without purpose. You can live as nothing more than a clever mammal. You can drift aimlessly. Some people do that.

Does human happiness require purpose? Perhaps on some level, maybe even the subconscious. Some people are happy without knowing why. To the degree they have conditioned themselves in the right way, or have achieved something they feel is important, they have followed some level of purpose. I believe most people are driven by a feeling of purpose on some level, even if it is contradictory, or not consciously identified or pursued.

So is it better to live with or without conscious purpose? Is it better to know what your purpose is and be driven by it, or is it better to drift, and allow luck, other people, and circumstance to shine favorably on you or not? Is it better to identify what you want to achieve with your life, or to just trust that by the end you will have achieved something? Both plans can lead to happiness, I think. But I’d rather take the conscious route.

If you’ve decided to consciously identify your purpose then I think the trick is to make it honest, which means, with fidelity to reality and fidelity to oneself. A dishonest purpose will only function as a limiting belief and lead to unhappiness.

It might even be better to allow yourself to drift, motivated by a correct but unidentified subconscious purpose, than identify a dishonest or ill-conceived purpose and try to live by it. Maybe the best policy: use your feelings, and your subconscious, as indicators of where you’ve got it wrong. Whenever you feel upset about something, or even ill at ease, or uncomfortable--work to find out what is causing it.

How do you “discover” your purpose?

“Discovering” a purpose implies that your purpose is something beyond you, or has a source outside of you. I think a purpose is heard or felt within. The challenge is not drowning out what your subconscious is screaming at you with all the other garbage your mind has convinced you is “true”. This is a kind of lie or evasion, and will only obfuscate your true purpose.

But if by “discovering” you mean really thinking hard about what you already, on some level, know to be true, then yes, you must undergo this process of “discovering”.

Introspecting might be a more useful word. Less confusing. Identifying would be the best word, I suppose. Turning the light of consciousness inwards and identifying what is most important to you, given everything you’ve experienced, everything you know, and everything you love.

What is it, on a truly fundamental level, that drives you? I think you already know the answer. You may not know it on a conscious level yet, but some part of you knows it. On some level, you have accumulated experiences, knowledge, and values which, taken as a whole, make you who you are. They drive you, whether you realize it or not.

Whether you have lived consciously and tried to be honest with yourself or if you have unconsciously drifted will only make it easier or harder to identify your purpose. But you have one.

Without it, you wouldn’t do anything.

What is Your Purpose in Life?

There’s really three ways of thinking about this.

Do I believe my purpose has a source outside of me in a mystical, other-worldly or supernatural way? Does a superior being have knowledge of my purpose and is withholding that information from me as a test to see whether I will be worthy of its possession? There are certainly powerful historical examples which would suggest this, e.g., Jesus, Joan of Arc, Henry V--people who, at their moment of greatest despair, asked God what they were supposed to do, and to their surprise and exhilaration received an answer. Is my purpose therefore a property of the world out there (or up there) and is it my job to discover it through prayer, meditation or a supernatural communication?

I don’t feel this to be true.

Does that mean it’s completely subjective, or arbitrary? Does whim determine my purpose? Do random events determine it? Can I lie to myself and trick myself into adopting any purpose? Does society determine my purpose? Does circumstance?

This isn’t right, either.

Certainly one’s life circumstances influence one’s purpose, in the sense of pushing it this way or that. It would be foolish to suggest that in sailing across an ocean, that sea conditions or storms didn’t alter one’s course. Of course they do. But that doesn’t change the purpose of reaching one’s ultimate destination: the other coast.

A third way to think about a life purpose then, would be that one’s purpose is not chosen arbitrarily, nor according to outside forces trying to push you this way or that. It is discovered as an internal event, and found when one is most honest and open to discovering it.

Perhaps this was the way for those historical figures who felt compelled by God. They were wise and honest people who a) spent their lives accumulating the necessary data to inform their purpose, b) used their minds in the correct way, such that they produced the right questions, c) asked the right question exactly when it needed asking, and d) allowed themselves to be open to an answer. The result was that when the answer came, a whole lifetime of proper mental preparation led to a moment that knocked them flat on their ass, and they achieved insight--not in the dribs and drabs and confusions that most of us experience, but whammo, all at once.

This certainly seems like God, or whatever you call it, talking to us. But I don’t think this is exclusive to “selected” people. Certainly, we all experience such flashes of insight every now and then. Times when the truth, hidden to us only a moment ago, suddenly leaps into view and causes us physical pain and/or exhilaration. Times when your eyes have suddenly opened in the middle of the night, or you’ve sat straight up in bed when you realized something. Times when it seems like there’s a voice whispering in our ear, or roaring in our skulls. The difference for those who experience revelation, I think, is that they’ve taught themselves to listen.

Perhaps this is what it means to be “called” to a purpose. A purpose is not necessarily something foisted on us from the outside, but it’s also not something that we wholly create.

It’s something internal, a truth that we feel compelled to acknowledge.

May 2, 2007

So, my younger self reminds me: acknowledge what you know to be true, in your heart of hearts. Purpose is what we must acknowledge, when we’re being fully honest with ourselves.

Do what you feel compelled to do.

For me, in the time we find ourselves, this means: keep sharing truths, keep connecting to other minds, keep fighting.

And fight now, since fighting later may become impossible, or pointlessly suicidal.

Every battle we have to fight now is one we should have fought earlier, when it was a smaller, more manageable fight, but for some reason didn’t. Actually, the reason we didn’t is obvious: to fight is to take on pain. How much easier to sink into the warm bath of belonging, to not “rock the boat”, to tell ourselves that things aren’t so bad, that we can tolerate a minor evil for the sake of “getting along”.

Of course, we’ve all seen how this turns out.

So this is the choice: take on pain now, or avoid pain, and endure massive, unbearable pain later?

It would be easy to pretend to some altruistic motives such as “you owe it to society/fellow humans/future generations.”

But standing up to lies and falsity and evil, even when it seems small, is actually a vital act of self-interest, for future you.

The other day, I ran across this line from the film Excalibur: “When a man lies, he murders a part of the world.” We might restate this as: “When a man allows a lie to go unchallenged, he murders his future self.”

As Jordan Peterson put it:

 “Why should you speak up? That’s easy, because the consequences of not speaking up, although delayed, are far worse. That’s the reason. If it can’t be courage, it could at least be prudence.”

And we can go maybe one step deeper in motivation: self-regard. Do you want to look at the person in the mirror as someone who defied falsity and stood for what was right, even when it was hard to do so?

For me, this comes down to integrity: in the matter of the fight for humanity, how do I want to have conducted myself?  By speaking up and fighting and perhaps causing others to do the same? Or by cowering and staying silent and going along to get along?

The primary motive, the purpose, is answering the call.

To keep one’s head down, to comply, to stay silent—these are easy. We have decades-old experiments which show that most humans would rather accept falsity in order to have the approval of the group, than to take on the pain of fighting for the truth.

If there is a future history of humanity (and not some fucked-up, “hackable” transhumanist version of us… but humanity), it will be owed to those who answered that call. History will forget the cowards and the collaborators. It will remember the dissidents who stood for truth.

This is why I believe in the power of these squiggly little black lines and why we have to go on making them and beaming them out to each other’s eyes: writing is the opposite of staying silent.

This project, listening for the call and answering it, apparently hasn’t changed much for me over the past sixteen years. The past three years have only served to amplify it.

In any case, thanks, younger me, for the reminder.

Maybe you’ve felt the same, and are called in your own way.

Have you listened to that voice? Tell us how.

Perhaps we will inspire one another to answer it.

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