Justify Your Existence

To yourself and no one else.

This is not the same thing as asking yourself "Why do I exist?" as you can answer that in an infinite number of ways. It instead asks, "Why is it good that I exist?"¹

This is a question worth bothering with because it's actually something important to know. What school teachers should be doing (but are not²) is getting students to ask themselves this question. It's a serious question. People need to know, and way too often they find out way too late. Talk to university students or even working adults late into their twenties and thirties and you'll find many still cruising aimlessly living paycheck to paycheck, hobby to hobby, vacation to vacation, or pursuing some superficial goal like "only once I get this or that then I'll be happy."³ Doing the next thing there is to do instead of spending time discovering what is truly meaningful to them so that they can then actually have a worthy goal that they can be proud of. It's not that rare that the longer people postpone, the harder it is to start. You see this in many Asian countries in particular though the West is unfortunately catching up: many elderly individuals who had spent their whole lives striving to climb their respective corporate ladders at the expense of everything else, attaching their entire sense of self to it. Then retirement happens, and with that new perspective from seeing things outside the familiar corporate bubble they inhabited, they discover how little everything mattered, and slip rapidly into nihilism.⁴

You don't need me telling you that life can be brutal. That's self-evident. Things fall apart on their own accord and you have to toil simply to keep things functioning. That's entropy.⁵ Not to mention we all have to eventually deal with our own mortality, and the mortality of those we care about. Once you add voluntary and conscious human evil into the mix on top of these harsh baseline conditions, it almost seems like the sane thing to do is to start wondering, "Hell, maybe it's just not worth it." or as someone familiar once put it, "To be, or not to be?"⁶

If you can imagine these default existential sufferings and conditions as eternal weights on a scale that's trying to answer the big questions of existence; where one side you have "Exist", and the other side "Not Exist". Boy, if that's not a lot of weight on the "Not Exist" side. Like really. As you can probably guess, answering "I dunno..." in the face of all that is not a very good answer; it’s kind of like having a wet napkin to protect yourself against the oncoming tsunami.⁷

So, what can you do about that? Well, if you look back in your life, where are those moments when you feel so engaged in what you're doing that you think, "This is worth the pain." "It's worth it." When every fiber of your being is saying, "Yes. I am doing the right thing, in the right place, in the right time." This felt-phenomenon of meaningful being is the best long-term antidote to the weight of existence that the human race has collectively managed to discover.⁸ Conscious or unconscious, it's fulfilment, it's purpose, it's love, and it says:

"It is good that I exist, in this reality as it is–and I refuse to apologize for my virtues."

It's so powerful that we've seen individuals sustain themselves off little else but that, go through hell and back and not be broken. You only need to glance briefly at twentieth-century war history to realize not only the bottomless pit of potential suffering and human evil, but also the infinite heights of potential human virtue and courage in the face of often literal annihilation.⁹

So the sensible question might be, "How do we get it? How do we feel more of that embodied feeling which justifies our existence to ourselves?" The answer seem to be, at least to me, that

we feel it as a consequence of moving toward a vivid and fully-articulated goal that we personally find truly meaningful. A goal that is aligned with reality and the truth, integrated through experience and heavily connected with your innate biological values.

The feeling itself is an embodied prediction that you are "on the right track". The more "on-track" you are, the more aligned with truth you become, which in turn increases the strength and frequency of that felt sense of meaning, which then justifies your existence.

To bring it back to coaching, my job is to use the coaching process to help you ally you and your goals, as much as I can, to your authentic grounded values and everything you discovered to be meaningful, so that the journey forward toward your personal “Polaris” would cultivate and develop a state of being which generates the best answer you will likely find to this core existential question.

What would your life look like if you can maintain that when attending to your goals?

What would your life look like if you can maintain that for the rest of your life?

You'd justify your existence to hell and back, that's what. Which in my books, is called being a hero.