Why do this?
I’m a nihilist. I don’t believe there’s any externally given meaning to our lives. Some people find the lack of an authority like God depressing, but I find it liberating. Devoid of any external guidance, humans truly have limitless potential and can do amazing things. There’s no one to say: ‘hey, that’s not allowed’. Whatever Physics doesn’t forbid is doable.
For me, what gets me up from bed every morning is to create things than nobody else has thought of before.
Why create?
Even though lives are meaningless, humans are cosmically significant. The knowledge and technology we create will eventually impact universe at a large scale. Say humans of future will be able to prevent sun from burning out or they’ll fly out to other stars. Humanity can exist indefinitely and can spread to the entire universe. It’s amazing to know that human creations can have an impact that would spans galaxies; and all acts of human creations – large or small – contribute to that human potential.
Why pursue excellence
Too many people are following societal rules and living their life on an auto pilot. Life is too short for mediocrity.
Entrepreneurs, scientists and artists are the ones who say – fuck it, I’m bored, I’m making my own rules. And it is only through that creative drive that those people end up improving other people’s lives.
Being a nihilist myself, I can relate to the ideas mentioned. But there is certainly one debatable point in this post, that is, humans are cosmically significant.
Even if we assume that descendants of modern humans somehow become something like a Type III civilization on Kardashev scale (which itself is an extremely far fetched idea considering that we just might die out without ever escaping our solar system), we will still be limited by the speed of causality, and if the expansion of universe really is accelerating, we will never be able to influence far away parts of our currently observable universe in any finite amount of time as it moves out of our future light cone.
And who knows how vast our reality actually is beyond the observable universe – it could be boundless for all we know, and what may exist beyond that is simply unimaginable!
So if we define the significance of a thing as it’s ability to influence the world around it, we are significant to our reaches just as a goldfish is significant to it’s jar.
Almost everything that exists lies beyond it.
Another complication with judging different approaches to life this way would be if time as we perceive it really is just an illusion and everything that is about to happen has “already” happened, our versions on the current time-slice just do not have memories of those events as they exist on the time-slices with higher entropy. So even though the process of memory formation makes us feel like we are moving towards our future and driving these events, our future versions may already be there.
All of us are on some kind of auto pilot in that case.
That being said, I too derive my purpose from creating, from pursuing excellence – simply because of personal preference, without looking for any objective significance to justify it.