A Mental Model
There's a question that follows you through your whole life. It shows up when you're choosing a career, lying awake at 2am, or standing in the shower on a Tuesday wondering if any of this actually matters.
What should I be doing?
As a kid, you could ask someone — a parent, a teacher — and they'd have an answer. As an adult, you realize nobody actually knows. They're all just doing their best with the same uncertainty you have.
I spent a long time sitting with that uncertainty. Not in an academic way — in the way where you're looking for a reason that any of it matters at all. What I found isn't comforting in the way most answers try to be. But I think it might be true. And for me, that's enough.
The Fork
Here's the core of it.
Every action you take is part of something larger. Brushing your teeth is part of your morning routine. Your morning routine is part of your day. Your day is part of your career, your relationships, your life. At every level, there's an implicit question: is this the right thing to be doing?
For small actions, it's easy. Squeeze toothpaste, not ketchup. But zoom out far enough and the question becomes: what is the right thing to do with your life? With all of human effort?
And the honest answer is: we don't know. As far as anyone has discovered, there is no guidance baked into the universe about what humans should be doing.
This leaves us at a fork:
If there's no right thing to do, then nothing matters. Any action is as good as any other. There's no reason to do anything — or to not do anything. That's a logically consistent position, but it's a dead end. You can't build a life on it. You can't build anything on it.
But if there is a right thing to do, and we don't know what it is, then the only action that makes sense is to figure it out.
The best thing to do is to figure out the best thing to do.
The Purpose
That's the idea, and I know it sounds circular. Stay with me.
The purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life.
This isn't a tautology — it's a starting point. It's the one conclusion that survives the uncertainty. We don't know what we're supposed to be doing, so the most defensible thing we can do is search for the answer.
A word on why I say purpose specifically. People tend to reach for three related words — meaning, mattering, and purpose — as though they're interchangeable. They're not.
Meaning is interpretive. "What is the meaning of life" is asking what all of this signifies — it's almost a literary question, as if life is a text and we're trying to decode it. Mattering is retrospective. Something mattered because it had an effect after it was over. You look back and judge impact.
Purpose is neither of these. Purpose is forward-looking. It's not "what does this mean" or "did this matter" — it's "what is this for." Where are you headed? What are you aiming at? Purpose is a navigation problem, not an interpretation problem or a measurement problem.
That distinction matters here because this framework isn't asking you to decode life or measure your impact. It's asking you to point yourself in a direction. And the direction it suggests is: toward the answer you don't have yet.
And once you adopt this framework, it becomes self-reinforcing. Why am I doing this? Because it advances the search. Why am I not doing that? Because it would limit my ability to search in the future.
Think about it from the other direction. If you were designing an AI and wanted to give it total freedom — not a narrow task like driving a car, but genuine autonomy — what goal would you give it?
Self-preservation? That assumes staying alive is the right thing to do. Procreation? That assumes multiplying is the right thing to do. Every specific goal you assign assumes its own correctness.
The only goal that doesn't smuggle in an unexamined assumption is: figure out what your goal should be.
Humans aren't blank slates like a hypothetical AI. We need food, water, safety, connection. But strip away the biological constraints and the logic holds. The most rational thing any free agent can do is determine what it should be doing.
Why Hope is the Only Rational Choice
You might ask: what if there really is no purpose? What if option two at the fork is the truth?
Here's why it doesn't matter.
We can't know which side of the fork is real. We don't have evidence either way. So we're choosing in the dark. And if we choose to believe there's nothing — no right action, no purpose — we get nothing. We sit in the dark.
If we choose to believe there might be something, we search. And either we find it, which is extraordinary. Or we don't find it, and we're no worse off than the person who never looked.
This isn't blind optimism. It's the same logic behind any exploration into the unknown. You don't refuse to look through a telescope because you might not find anything.
Hope isn't naive here. It's the only position that has any upside.
What If I'm Wrong?
I've shared this idea with a lot of people. Most give me a polite nod, or an "hmm, interesting." The lack of engagement makes me doubt myself sometimes.
So what if I'm wrong?
If I'm wrong and the purpose of life is already known — then great. We win. Someone has the answer.
If I'm wrong and the purpose of life is unknowable — then the most important thing to do is to try to discover it anyway, because we can't know it's unknowable until we've exhausted the search.
Either way, I end up back in the same place: searching.
What This Means in Practice
If the purpose of life is to discover the purpose of life, some things follow.
Optimize for opportunity. The more options you have, the more directions you can search. Every choice that opens doors is better than one that closes them. This applies to education, career, relationships, health — anything that expands or contracts what's available to you.
Meet your base needs first. You can't search for the meaning of existence if you're struggling to eat. Isaac Newton didn't discover the laws of motion while hunting for food. Security and stability aren't the goal — they're the platform that lets you pursue the goal.
Build resources. In today's world, this often means money. Not as an end, but as a tool. Resources buy time, stability, and influence. They let you focus on the search instead of survival. They also let you help others focus on the search.
Work together. This problem is almost certainly bigger than any one person or any one lifetime. It took humanity thousands of years to explain the motion of the stars — and those were things we could see and measure. Discovering the purpose of life, if there is one, is likely a multigenerational project. The more people working on it, the better our chances.
Share this framework. If this way of thinking has value, then explaining it to others multiplies the effort. That's why I'm writing this.
Take death seriously. Death is the ultimate end to opportunity. No actions can be taken after it. If we're serious about this search, extending human life should be near the top of the priority list. Not out of fear — out of logic. More time means more searching.
The Invitation
I don't have this figured out. That's the whole point — none of us do.
But I think the search itself is the most honest and productive thing we can do with the uncertainty we've been given. And I think it's better done together than alone.
If this resonates with you, or if you think it's wrong and can articulate why — I want to hear from you. The idea gets stronger every time someone pushes back on it, because pushing back on it is the idea in action.
What should we be doing? Let's find out.
Join the search
This idea is early. The search is just beginning. If you want to be part of it — to question it, extend it, or tear it apart — come find us.
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