Why do people call themselves intelligent, then neglect to find out the answer to the most important question of their lives, “Why do I exist?”

4 Answers:

Danya Rose, Mathematician and general student of life, with a few years of Tai Chi Chuan.

Who says “Why do I exist?” is the most important question of everyone’s lives? Something is never just important in a vacuum. It can only be important to someone. Those people have agency to decide what is important to them.

I have considered the question, and I’ve dismissed it as unimportant because knowing the answer wouldn’t change anything for the better (at least as far as I can imagine). Beyond that, it seems like an exploding question: in some sense, if the universe “just is”, there’s no a priori reason for me to exist except for the boundary and initial conditions of the universe (and even then, maybe not); we could go so far as to say that I exist because my parents had sex, resulting in me (which reduces to the previous outlook); maybe, if there even is a purpose, it’s not for me to know; maybe my reason for existing is to find out exactly why I exist (how meta: existing only to find out why one exists!); maybe my reason for existing is to help someone else figure that out; or prevent it; maybe I’m just a pawn in some infinite-dimensional game; maybe my purpose is to affect some particular thing in some particular way so that some other particular person will affect something else some particular way so that… eventually some particular outcome will result in ten thousand years; maybe my purpose is to be weighed down by considering all the possible reasons for existing; maybe it’s to encourage other people to stop; maybe this; maybe that; maybe the other; or something else!

How the bloody hell am I supposed to wade through this morass and figure out (a) what all the possibilities are, (b) which ones to discard, and (c) how the hell to do that?

No thanks. I’ve decided the reason I exist does not include seeking specifically to find out precisely why I exist. Maybe I’ll stumble on the reason by accident - and hope it’s something palatable. For now I exist to stop procrastinating on Quora and mark assignments so I can get home before stupid o’clock (if it’s not already too late for that).

Wesley Snyder, B.S. in Anthropology & B.A. in Philosophy, University of West Georgia

I think most people, intelligent or not, know why they exist. Because their parents got involved with some hot n’ steamy relations at some point.

Sweety Singal, I code, read and write

Probably because they know that humanity is no where near to finding the solution to that question. So meanwhile, we may as well enjoy the work whatever we are good at and keep contributing.

  Amazingly people, who are supposedly intelligent, are programmed not to think that the most important question is of no value to them. Being born to die is fine. Why should a person worry about the reason for existence? Yet every one likes to think that there is meaning in life. The problem is there is no meaning if we are born just to die. However, if we are born on Earth to demonstrate that we hate the fact that death reigns and we all suffer the aging process, by seeking the Creator, then this provides a purpose and reason for our existence.

 

 The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things.  He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings,  that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.  ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ (Acts 17:224-28)

 

 Only those who genuinely seek the truth, seek the Lord of Creation. Everyone else will settle for suffering and death.