But what is important? What is the purpose of your life? It may seem like you have some imperative task, or some ultimate goal, but if you trace it back, it’s probably not that essential. I suspect that some fairly meaningless event(s) happened to you and you chose to create attachment to it.

When I look at the human race from the highest perspective that my tiny human brain can manage, I see only a single goal; Survival. But for what purpose? Just as our primitive ancestors didn’t have a grasp on the way we see our own existence now, I believe that we don’t have a grasp on the purpose for our existence in the future. So, let’s just say for arguments sake, that we do have a purpose, but we just don’t know what it is yet. What we do know, is that if we haven’t evolve to the stage where we do know what this purpose is by the time the sun dies out in about 5 billion years, then we’re probably going to have to figure out some way of getting out of here.

Imagine we figure out space travel, and develop a reliable and abundant source of energy. Assuming that we can travel a fraction of the speed of light, it’s going to take generations of travel in order to reach other planets/sources of information/sources of energy. We could place our human bodies in time capsules, but then we’d end up being eaten by Aliens and Sigourney Weaver would have to blast them all to hell. A safer and more practical solution would be to spend the years of travel, continuing to evolve, until we reach our next destination. Then we’d have to travel even further, and so on, until we finally came to the ultimate destination… The Meaning of Life. It may not be a physical destination, it may not be a mental state of mind, it may just be a restaurant at the end of the universe, but as I mentioned before, we’re not evolved enough to be able to understand what it is yet.

Those people (if we can still call them people by that point, since we evolved from something other than people, we’ll probably evolve out of it too, but we’re still connected), are the ones that are handed the task of continuing the human race until we reach that destination; they are the Interim. We are the interim. We are the ones who are responsible for continuing this seemingly insignificant task of survival.

So, what do we do in the meantime? We play games, we act out different characters and pretend to ourselves and other people that there truly is significance in our individual existence. If your parents birth control had worked, or that time I got hit by a car when I was 5 years old was fatal instead of just breaking my collar bone, things wouldn’t really be so different. We like to think that we’re valuable, or that we’re having an impact on something vitally important. As a species, we are invaluable to our own future existence, but as an individual, if you don’t invent that Perpetual Motion machine, it doesn’t matter, someone else will.

So while we’re either stuck on a space craft travelling millions of years to get to a new galaxy, or stuck on this planet waiting billions of years for the sun to cough up it’s last fireball, the question will always be…

What are ‘you’ going to waste your life doing?

In practise though, the world we live in doesn’t always react the way we expect it to. The element of chance always shows up at some point, and I welcome his unpredictable ways. So when you set out to seek rewards, the outside world can sometimes respond in a manner which is counter productive to your quest. I’ve come up with two possible solutions to this dilemma; You could either ignore the outside world and listen only to the feedback that’s happening in your own head, or you could apply a filter to all the feedback you get and attach relevance to the parts which serve you best.

There is a story about a man who decided to become self motivated… and despite the penalties that loomed over his goal, he carried on regardless and continued to be passionate about something he believed in.

It’s an inspirational story that shows us that it is possible for someone to be passionate about something, despite the attempted influences of the outside world.

Why do we use Facebook, in particular? I asked a couple of people why they used it, and got some interesting responses. Some people get dates, some get business contacts, some get a sense of connection with friends that live too far away and some people simply get entertainment from it. I liked the way one of my friends said that it was like sending a bulk email, but without the guilt of feeling like a spammer (has Facebook managed to simply re-brand the bulk email into something less annoying?). The common thing here, is that we all ‘get’ something. So because we are continuously being provided with ‘rewards’, we continue to use it. There are a limited number of things that we can do on the site, which makes it easier for the other junkies to respond with an encouraging message or a ‘I like this’. Where are the ‘dislike’ links, may I ask? And why is it that we can only ‘like’ something? If we can only respond in this manner with either a neutral (not clicking the like link) or a positive (clicking the link), then where did the negative go? Is the neutral now taking on the role of the negative, and if so, does that mean that the hundred or so people that don’t click that they like the link, actually mean that they don’t like it?

I was going to suggest that Facebook mirrors how we interact with people in our lives outside of our browser portals, but in a fast paced way, driven by the speed of communication that the advent of the internet provides us. It could be regarded as a tool to fish for rewards, except this is the trawler that sucks up a whole load of shrimp in one go. If this was truly a reflection of our normal daily lives; just another step in the progress of man rather than a shift in direction, then why are we encouraged to make only positive comments? I know the option is still there to make negative ones, it’s just not as easy to do so. I imagine that if there was a dislike link, then the number of possible reward catches per day would be reduced by the number of negative dolphins that you caught in your net whilst scraping the bottom of the ocean. I would imagine then, that people would use Facebook less, and that doesn’t seem to be something that this Business would want to happen. So, it’s a controlled system… not exactly a surprise…

Do I want to be getting reward from a system that reflects an over simplified version of communication? I like life, I like it’s complexities. I’m not saying that Facebook is a bad boy and should be sent to his room without any supper, I’m just saying that if you’re going to play together, then just remember that he is slightly retarded and despite it being fun to beat him at Junior Scrabble, don’t neglect your other more intelligent friends, who although won’t be so easy to beat at word games, could provide a much greater reward over a longer period of time (and will actually tell you if they don’t like something).