The Relation of Purposelessness to Prosperity

The desire to help people around us is natural. We are empathetic creatures who are bred to help propagate what benefits our ideas and genes. I believe the desire to save humanity, or the world, in general, is not rooted in the same motivations.

The desire to save the world and/or humanity has two main motivations …

The first one is best stated in a famous quote by HL Mencken. “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” Sometimes people use saving humanity as the excuse to rule and sometimes they are deluding themselves into thinking that their power lust has greater motivations underlying them.

The other one is becoming vastly more common the richer the world get: Guilt rooted in purposelessness. The richer people become and the more disconnected wealth is from production, the more people lose their understanding of individual purpose and use.

Centuries ago people produced to survive. The journey of survival was the motivating factor, but we evolved to be able to produce and find purpose in that production. We felt value as human beings in providing for ourselves and serving the people and values we care about.

Today, our production is seemingly more distanced from our survival and the result is purposelessness. Purposelessness leads to depression and low self esteem, this leads to guilt, and this leads a person to have little motivation in their own life, values or purpose. This void motivates a person to search for purpose and validation … some will find drugs, others will find altruism. This altruism feels so validating to this individual since it further validates their feelings of worthlessness.

Schooling, welfare, infantilizing young adults, overprotecting children, and policies keeping young people from producing create these depressed and pitiful humans. However, unfortunately, it is partially probably a byproduct of wealth itself. We are evolved for the journey of survival and abundance, we aren’t evolved to be handed survival and abundance. Too many people are vastly too disconnected from the roots of production and wealth to psychologically internalize their value in the evolutionary historical way. Too many of us are animals stuck in a zoo. Unfortunately, they take their pitiful existence out on others in an attempt to validate their existence.