It's something that we Humans have been trying to attribute to our species since we gained critical thought. This is question bred of fear and lack of understanding. Fear of our very existence being nothing more than a statistical probability and we're all fundamentally just a collection of gases that cooled long enough to gain consciousness.
Something about this frightens a lot of people and rightfully so. Our very society functions on the concept of personal purpose. You, the individual, are important enough to have a purpose on this planet. To contribute, experience, breed and ultimately do enough that leaves some sort of impression on the planet or society when we die. It's an oversimplification, but that's pretty much the tl;dr of our existence on this planet and I can fully understand why the concept of having no guiding purpose in the grand scale of the universe would scare a lot of people.
That's a theory that I subscribed to my whole life; we're all just a happy accident and we shouldn't be vain or egotistical enough to think that we deserve a purpose. Just existing should be rewarding enough. We drew the right numbers in the cosmic lottery and here we are.
Lately, though, my views have changed and it happened when I was browsing the internet, down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia, reading about Sumerian Tablets. More specifically, the words on the tablet.
No, this is not some kind of "I found the answer to life on a ten thousand year old tablet" kind of post, because that's absurd. The tablet I read about held a trivial message about scholars and their teachers, so it did not have some cryptic life-changing revelation. It was the concept of written word through time that opened my eyes and filled me with wonder.
Since man discovered written word, it's been our goal to document and preserve it over time. From the most ancient of civilizations to now, the recollection of history, function and religion has held a great importance to us as a species. We try to preserve our words in time as best we can. Immortalize them so they can immortalize us in the process.
We've become incredibly efficient at it as well. Ancient Egyptians used to engrave word straight into stone, preserving thoughts that range from religion to mathematics. This is at a time when papyrus was commonly used in writing, but did not have the preservation qualities of stone or marble. Here we are in 2015 with the digitization of word and thought, making it far more accessible and easily preserved.
It's our collective consciousness - this is our purpose. Like a voice that you cannot hear, but has been spoken since Humans could write and is continually speaking as long as we keep contributing to it and preserving it. It transcends time more than our physical selves ever could, and my voice today may be heard in 2000 years time as the 4000 year old voice of the Sumerian scholar was heard by me now.
The advent of technology and digitization has evolved the voice. It's given it the opportunity to leave us and expand outwards into space. Right now we can take all of recorded history, all of our discoveries and ideas and send them into the unknown, so that in the event should something happen to us or our planet, our existence from when we learned to write, right until the moment we perished would have been saved. A backup of our consciousness, if you will, and I think that's pretty fucking cool.
Why are we here? I can't answer the certainly, but I made a connection that resonated well enough with me to make this post. We're here to learn and experience so we can record what we've learned, transcend ourselves as individuals and immortalize our words as a collective. Just like we've lost ancient civilizations to time, so will we be lost to time, but our words and thoughts may live on forever.
I think that's purpose enough for me to feel validated.
