The metaphysical question, although simple, is one that most people on earth do not know how to answer.
Beginning yet another mundane Monday with switching class (instead of going to the lecture at 10, I decided to go at 4), I open my laptop and start saying hello to the virtual world: what’s happening on Twitter, Facebook, checking e-mails – Yahoo, Gmail, Unimail, and YouTube news.
Stumbling upon a random video on YouTube, I found myself asking, ‘why am I here, on this earth?’
Some Christians, in the video, know their purposes on earth. Some people comment that even Plato and Aristotle, in all their wisdom, can’t give a satisfying answer to this question. Others say that they’re here to “have a good life.”
So, why am I here?
Science says that it doesn’t matter if I’m here or not, that I’m insignificant, just another human being among the other 110 billion who have been born.
Businesses say that I’m here to become a good consumer and spend more on material things.
Environmentalists say that I’m here to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, to make global warming worse, with little good contribution towards the nature around me.
The virtual reality world says that I’m here to increase more traffic – to use Facebook, four different e-mail portals, WordPress, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and a bunch of other websites.
Law says that I’m here to be a good citizen with the other 80% of people who have never broken any rules, so that they have less things to take care about.
These answers, although factual, don’t really get to the answer why we are here.
Imagine that you have an iPhone. You can use this Apple product in various ways, and download apps to your hearts content. However, the iPhone is still a creation, and our knowledge is limited as we are only users. To understand its full potential, we need to ask the iPhone’s creator what it’s been created for.
The same thing happens with humans. We can fill our lives with anything – to use our time practically and to do anything we want. But to maximise the limited time that we have, to answer that very core of why we are created, we need to ask the creator.
The more I try to answer the question and share it with you, the more I feel it’s not what I’m supposed to do. It will become just another cliché, another statement, another saying that doesn’t make sense to anyone else but me. In a sense, the question, ‘why are you here’, is important to answer, yet it is personalised to each person.
You may believe that there is a God who created humans, or you may also believe that there are no creators that have created humans. Whatever the case is, living life only once, why should we live another mundane life – to grow, to go to school, to work, to get married, to have children to grow older, and then to die?
Live your life knowing the answer to the question, “Why are you here?”
Then, it would not be just another life.
This post was written by
Marcella Purnama is a second-year psychology and media and communications major at Melbourne University. She spends most her time writing and blogging (http://marcellapurnama.wordpress.com/), or else she can be found hopping from one Melbourne cafe to the other, trying all the different coffee shots. Disney, movies, and love fill three-quarter of her brain, so hopefully studies will be there somewhere among the quarter. Loving life, she is determined to live her best.
