What Are We Doing Here? Five Answers (+ Mine)

This question has been asked since the beginning of time: by monks, nuns, philosophers, therapists, drunk teenagers with the munchies at 2 a.m., and maybe you at some point in your life.

What are we doing here?

Are we here to grow? To suffer? To achieve? To awaken? To love?

Different thinkers have offered very different answers. Here are five I dig. And then I’ll tell you where I’m landing on this one lately.

Carl Jung: Become Who You Actually Are

Jung believed the purpose of life is individuation—becoming whole.

Not perfectly healed. Not successful. Not impressive.

Whole.

In Jungian terms, that means: facing your shadow, integrating the parts of yourself that you’d rather disown, and gradually becoming more fully yourself. Less mask. More essence.

As he put it, “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”

Alan Watts: You’re Already Doing It

Philosopher Alan Watts had little patience for the idea that life is a somber march toward a final reward.

He often said, and I love it, that the meaning of life is simply to be alive, comparing it to a musical composition. In music, the point is never to get to the end—it’s the playing of the notes.

Watts said, “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple.”

You’re already doing it: just being here, breathing, participating.

Simone de Beauvoir: Choose Your Response

De Beauvoir took a more existential route. There is no pre-written script. No cosmic instruction manual.

In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she wrote that our task is to assume our freedom and act in ways that enable freedom for others, too. We may not get to choose our circumstances, but we get to choose our response.

Viktor Frankl: Answer with Meaning

Viktor Frankl believed the primary human drive is meaning.

After surviving the Holocaust, he concluded that even in unimaginable suffering, we retain one freedom: to choose our attitude. To find meaning, purpose, in life’s pain.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés: Don’t Lose Your Wild Soul

Estés suggests that the purpose of life is to protect what is wild, intuitive, cyclical, and alive within the soul.

A life loses its juju when we stop listening to our inner compass, numb out, or over-adapt. But it deepens when we stay true to that inner knowing, even when it’s inconvenient or uncomfortable.

My Take: Flow. But the Real Kind.

If you asked me today, I’d say the purpose of life is: just to flow.

Not the shiny, Instagram, “everything is aligned and effortless” joy-and-light version.

I mean the kind that makes room for the boulders. The rapids. The times of darkness, loss, and disorientation. The identity collapses. The winters.

The kind that doesn’t require clarity at all times and admits the existence of obstacles. The kind that moves with life’s pains—and leaves room for self-kindness when said obstacles make you want to punch a wall.

Everyone here is pointing at something similar. I just call it flow.

Not because it’s easy.

But because everything is included.

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