I was just wondering if you people have any long term goals in life, and if so, why you have these specific goals. In other words: what do you live for, what is (or will be) your most long term project spanning decades of your life?

I’m not asking for things like ‘become happy’, but some more concrete stuff. I can understand that you don’t know what exactly your lifework is going to be, but you might have at least a vague direction of where you are going. Or you might not, of course.

A lot of people seem to strive for a happy family kind of thing: marry, get children, get a car, buy a house, work really hard for a random company until you retire, have the occasional family visits and just entertain yourself through it without further goals.

I’m not even sure if these people choose to do this. I think it’s more that it kind of happens to them. The girls asks to have a baby and you might not exactly consider it very well and BAM you’re down the road of the above story. It might also be so that due to failing to reach any higher goals family life becomes top priority. It seems to me that a lot of people lose their hobbies/serious ambitions when they have kids, and eventually start living for the only purpose of giving their family/offspring a good life.

I think this is pretty sad. Why do people bother living for their offspring when their kids might live for their offspring and so forth? Where does this lead to, except far in time. It takes so much time to gain knowledge and skills of some sort already, just getting children and counting on your kids (as last hope) in reaching anything throws all of your expertise (or time to exercise your expertise) away. Why not break the cycle?

So then if you’re not parting with the American dream life goals and if you’re a little more ambitious, the most logical thing would be to have a huge project to spend your life on. I’m thinking of a big science/technology project that takes up decades of your life. It could be anything: a new physics theory, a big invention in some area or starting a thriving company. This could – if you’re lucky, good and know how to exploit it – get the real big cash floating. It’s also pretty much an opium that makes you forget about the elapse of time.

And when you have a lot of money, you can actually hire people to realize your dreams, or at least have help working on it. This makes it so much easier to achieve your end goal.

But in the end, in the end it was just you getting carried away in the game of life. There are so many of these things you can do, invent, you can work yourself up in so many ladders, jobs, you can master so many different expertises. A lot of them are great fun, but the choices are endless.

In the end you might (or might not) have benefitted the world, done something for others, and you might even have enjoyed. But yeah, there you are.

Then we have death, of course. I doubt anyone is afraid of dying (as if it matters how you die), but have you ever been in fear of being dead – the world without your presence, your consciousness lost forever? Personally I am frightened to death when I fully realise the possibility of myself disappearing. It’s so sad that death seems such an unbeatable barrier.

Many of my own projects have grown larger with myself getting older (and I’m young). Even when we’re only talking about hobby projects there are some that have have taken up years now – and these are the projects that I feel pressing on the back of my skull screaming “FINISH ME DAMMIT”. I will have the time to finish these, but what I want to illustrate with this is that if projects keep getting bigger, at some point there just isn’t more time to spend in life to finish whatever business (or life goal) you were up to. You’re going to get to the point of dying. You ran out of time, game over.

It would be great to approach living forever: do the gross of the fun things, finish all the projects you start and work yourself to the top in many different professions. The universe as a huge playground. Sadly immortality is impossible, but the most logical and noble life goal I can come up with is prolonging life to the maximum. Also obviously this includes getting rid of the fragile human body and more importantly finding a way to replace my human brains with more durable hardware. And the trick is doing this without breaking myself or my consciousness, and without accidentily copying myself instead of transferring. There is a lot of work to be done, and I really ought to get starting.

I probably sound like somebody with a bad case of premature midlife crisis. But the truth is that I’m far from that, and I’m ready to get my hands dirty. If you weren’t totally thrown off by this post, then I’d love to hear some feedback and to hear about your life goal(s).

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed