Eric-Jorgenson The-Almanack-of-Naval-Ravikant indd

A really unbounded, big question: what is the meaning and 
purpose of life?
That’s a big question. Because it’s a big question, I’ll give you 
three answers.
Answer 1: It’s personal. You have to find your own meaning. 
Any piece of wisdom anybody else gives you, whether it’s 
Buddha or me, is going to sound like nonsense. Fundamentally, 
you have to find it for yourself, so the important part is not 
the answer, it’s the question. You just have to sit there and dig 
with the question. It might take you years or decades. When 
you find an answer you’re happy with, it will be fundamental 
to your life.
Answer 2: There is no meaning to life. There is no purpose to 
life. Osho said, “It’s like writing on water or building houses 
of sand.” The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the 
Universe, 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the 
next 70 billion years or so, until the heat death of the Universe.
Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human 
race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Even the 
group who colonizes Mars will disappear. No one is going to 
remember you past a certain number of generations, whether 
you’re an artist, a poet, a conqueror, a pauper, or anyone else. 
There’s no meaning.
You have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils 
down to. You have to decide:
“Is this a play I’m just watching?”

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P H I L O S O P H Y · 195
“Is there a self-actualization dance I’m doing?”
“Is there a specific thing I desire just for the heck of it?”
These are all meanings you make up.
There is no fundamental, intrinsic purposeful meaning to 
the Universe. If there was, then you would just ask the next 
question. You’d say, “Why is that the meaning?” It would be, 
as physicist Richard Feynman said, it would be “turtles all the 
way down.” The “why’s” would keep accumulating. There is no 
answer you could give that wouldn’t have another “why.”
I don’t buy the everlasting afterlife answers because it’s insane 
to me, with absolutely no evidence, to believe because of how 
you live seventy years here on this planet, you’re going to spend 
eternity, which is a very long time, in some afterlife. What kind 
of silly God judges you for eternity based on some small period 
of time here? I think after this life, it’s very much like before 
you were born. Remember that? It’s going to be just like that.
Before you were born, you didn’t care about anything or 
anyone, including your loved ones, including yourself, includ-
ing humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we 
stay on planet Earth, whether there’s an AI or not. After death, 
you just don’t care either.