What’s the purpose of life? The question is annoying and contingent and probably unanswerable, but it’s also important and vital and guides our actions. I’ve been thinking about the purpose of life lately, for obvious reasons related to me prematurely dying, and my answer is congruent with the Brooks answer: life is about other people and our relationships—defined broadly—to them. Okay, if that’s the answer then can we be dismissed and go home to watch TV? Probably not, because the answer demands more elaboration, though most of us sweep it under the rug sometime in our late teens or early 20s and prefer not to revisit it, as if it’s an elderly relative who is no longer really here.

The “What’s the purpose of life?” question is not only annoying but also frequently uncomfortable, since it foregrounds the end, which is, at current technological levels, inevitable. We don’t like the question because we don’t want to ask: are we living up to our potential? Are we achieving our purpose(s)? If the answer is “no,” it’s comforting to ask other, less important questions, like who won the game last night. We can’t always be asking the big questions. Often, we have to be asking: “What’s for dinner tonight, and who’s going to make it?” But we should sometimes ask them, and try to answer.

If our everyday actions are incompatible with what the purpose of our lives ought to be, that argues for course correcting. Course correcting is hard, too, relative to continuing to do what we’re already doing. I’m guilty of coasting because it’s easy. I’m also guilty, though, of a certain fondness for both absurdity and excessively avoiding banalities, both of which lend themselves to not only thinking about hard, unanswerable things, but sorting people in those who are like me and those who are repelled by me. Lately I’ve been dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and when casual acquaintances or distant almost-friends have asked how I am, I’ve tended to answer: “I’m dying; how about you?” (Bess has an essay on this that she’s been noodling around on for a while). Maybe casually and sunnily saying that I’m dying makes me anti-social. Maybe it makes me pro-social. There’s a more serious point lurking beneath the dark humor, though: Let’s skip the small talk and get at something real, whatever “real” means. I don’t wholly know what it means but I often see what it doesn’t mean.

David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen has an answer about the purpose of life that I more or less agree with, albeit with some caveats and some noticing-of-omissions: he writes that, for a lot of us, the purpose of life is to know other people (and to find the love of a good woman, or perhaps good women, depending). In saying that the purpose of life is other people, Brooks is pushing against the flow of American society, which is becoming lonelier and more disconnected from others than it was a few decades ago:

“The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. The number of American adults without a romantic partner increased by a third.”

Why are we lonely and prone to suicide? Lots of reasons, presumably, and Brooks says we need not just other people but the specific skills to connect with other people:

People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

Brooks also says: “These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.” I find myself agreeing, and yet it seems that most people don’t agree with Brooks or me, or we’d see more change and less loneliness.

Revealed preferences show most, or many, people prefer the problems of loneliness to the problems of connection and relationship. Given the data, maybe loneliness is a symptom of large-scale learned helplessness; unhappiness and isolation begets more unhappiness and isolation as the modern status-quo. Technology also makes being alone relatively more fun than it was, say, 30 years ago, which may push people towards not cultivating the weak social ties that eventually become close friends, lovers, and confidants. Facebook, however, is not going to help you when you need it most—but Facebook also isn’t going to demand help of you. Real connection means reciprocity, which is bidirectional, and it seems a lot of us can’t be bothered.

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