What Is the Purpose of Life?

By Jocelyn Kate | JustJocelynThings – Nurturing Minds, Bodies, and Imaginations

A Neuroscientific and Existential Exploration of Feeling, Curiosity, and Consciousness

There’s one question that I’ve returned to again and again—not out of distress or confusion, but because it’s just so damn fascinating:
What is the purpose of life?

It’s a question that has echoed across cultures, disciplines, and centuries—asked by philosophers, scientists, mystics, and five-year-olds alike. It’s primal, human, and deeply woven into how our brains are wired.

Some people stumble into the question during major life transitions. Others ask it under the stars or in the middle of a random Tuesday. For me, it’s never been about crisis. It’s about curiosity. I’ve never needed an answer to soothe me—I’ve asked because I want to understand. Because we’re here, and it’s weird, and it’s beautiful, and it makes no sense—and that is worth exploring.

So… why are we here?

Not just here like “on Earth,” but here in a body. With consciousness. With feelings. With breath and hunger and touch and thought. Why do we exist at all, and what are we meant to do with this existence?

What makes this question so unique is that it’s neurobiologically rare. While many animals experience pleasure, pain, and instinctual drives, humans have a prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain responsible for self-reflection, abstract thought, and future planning. This gives us the ability to wonder not just how we exist, but why.

According to Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, the human drive for meaning is more fundamental than the drive for power or pleasure. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he argued that meaning is the primary motivational force in humans, and when we lose touch with that meaning, we begin to suffer—not because we are broken, but because we are built to seek purpose.

Psychologists call this the “will to meaning.“ It’s not about one right answer. It’s about the fact that we’re wired to ask.

Even in neuroscience, the drive to understand our purpose is reflected in the activity of the default mode network (DMN)—a brain network activated when we daydream, self-reflect, or imagine the future. It’s most active during rest, when we’re not task-focused, suggesting that searching for meaning is the brain’s natural resting state (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010).

In other words: when we’re not distracted or performing, we start to wonder what it’s all for.
That’s not dysfunction. That’s design.

So, if we weren’t put here to accumulate stuff, earn status, or reach a final “goal,”
then what are we here for?

The more I sit with that question—not just intellectually, but in my body—the more I realize this:

Maybe the purpose of life isn’t about solving some cosmic riddle.
Maybe it’s to experience things you can only experience while being alive.
To feel. To sense. To move. To be touched. To be awed. To cry. To laugh so hard you can’t breathe.

Maybe it’s not about finding meaning “out there.”
Maybe it’s about feeling meaning through your body—moment by moment.

That’s the direction we’re going in this piece—not toward one final answer, but toward a deeper understanding of why we’re wired to ask, and how feeling might be the most sacred answer we’ve got.

We’re Built to Feel: The Brain and Body as a Sensory Instrument

At the most fundamental level, you are a feeling organism.
Before you were a thinker, a doer, or a planner—you were a sensor. A perceiver.
Every part of your body, from your skin to your gut to your bones, evolved to detect, interpret, and respond to experience.

We tend to think of the brain as the control center of the body, but in reality, it’s more like a prediction machine built to process the constant flood of information coming in through the senses. From a neuroscience perspective, your primary function is not to produce or accumulate—it’s to feel, sense, and respond to life as it happens.

Sensory Processing Is the Foundation of Consciousness

Everything you know about the world—and about yourself—comes through sensation.
Your brain receives input from sensory receptors located in the skin, muscles, organs, and sense organs. These inputs are then routed through the thalamus and distributed to specialized areas of the brain for interpretation.

The somatosensory cortex processes touch, pain, pressure, and temperature.
The insula tracks interoceptive signals—your internal body state like hunger, heart rate, breath, and emotional intensity.
The limbic system, especially the amygdala and hippocampus, tags sensory data with emotional meaning and stores it in long-term memory.
The default mode network links these inputs into a cohesive narrative of self, giving you a sense of personal identity and continuity.

According to neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, emotion and sensation aren’t secondary—they are the foundation of consciousness. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, he argues that without feeling, there is no self. No present moment. No continuity of experience. Just disjointed data.

You don’t think your way into being human.
You feel your way into it.

The Body Is a Living Interface for Experience

Your body is not just a shell or vehicle—it’s a biological interface between consciousness and the physical world. Your skin alone contains over 1,300 nerve endings per square inch, acting as a full-body touch organ. And your fascia, the connective tissue that wraps your muscles and bones, is now understood to be rich in proprioceptive and emotional signaling, making it a key player in embodied awareness (Schleip et al., 2012).

This means that movement, sensation, and emotion are not separate processes. They are fully integrated. Feeling sadness isn’t just mental—it’s heaviness in the chest, hollowness in the stomach, altered posture, slower breathing.
Joy? It’s lightness in the limbs, tingling skin, warm cheeks, a lifted face.
The nervous system is the language of feeling.

Emotions Are Embodied Predictions, Not Abstract Ideas

Recent work in predictive processing theory suggests that your brain is constantly forecasting what’s going to happen next—not just in the world, but inside your own body. These forecasts are shaped by past experiences and updated by present sensory data.

In this model (Barrett, 2017), emotions are not things that “happen to us”—they’re constructed in real time based on the brain’s best guess about what your body is experiencing and what that sensation means.

So when your stomach tightens before an important conversation, or your heart flutters before a kiss, it’s not random. It’s your brain reading your body’s state and assigning meaning based on context.
This is the basis of interoception—your sixth sense.

You are not just seeing, touching, or smelling the world. You are constantly interpreting the meaning of those sensations in a dynamic, adaptive, and deeply embodied way.

You Exist to Experience

From birth to death, your system is organized around experience.
Not outcomes. Not optimization. Not perfection.
But presence—to what it feels like to be alive.

This is why babies explore the world through touch, sound, and movement. Why we seek warmth, texture, rhythm, and connection before we can even form language. These are developmental imperatives because they lay the foundation for identity, regulation, and attachment.

And they remain essential throughout life.

People who engage more deeply with sensory experience—through dance, play, food, breathwork, intimacy, nature—consistently show:

Lower cortisol levels (less stress)
Better emotion regulation (greater vagal tone)
Higher self-reported life satisfaction
Increased activation in the ventral striatum (reward) and insula (embodied awareness)

In other words: your body feels more alive when it’s actually used—not numbed, overworked, or over-scrolled.

Life Isn’t About Stuff: Why Accumulation Can’t Satisfy a Sensory Organism

It’s easy to forget—but life isn’t about stuff.
Not really. Not in any lasting, fulfilling, deeply human way.

Modern society sells us the illusion that meaning lives in consumption. That success is measured in possessions, square footage, the number of likes, the price tags on our clothes, or the perceived prestige of our careers.

But if you zoom out—and also zoom in, into your own nervous system—it becomes clear: you were not built to accumulate. You were built to experience.

Evolution Didn’t Design Us to Hoard—It Designed Us to Feel

From an evolutionary standpoint, our biological systems aren’t built to chase luxury. They’re built to seek safety, connection, stimulation, and pleasure in the form of adaptive sensory rewards.

The early human brain evolved under conditions of scarcity and high variability. So we developed dopaminergic pathways to motivate us to explore, bond, forage, and create. Not to endlessly collect—because excess was unnatural and irrelevant to survival.
This is why dopamine doesn’t deliver sustained satisfaction. It spikes in anticipation, not possession. Once you get the thing? The system resets. This is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—a psychological and neurochemical loop where satisfaction fades shortly after a desire is fulfilled (Brickman & Campbell, 1971; Berridge & Robinson, 1998).

You adapt. The new car becomes normal. The designer shoes become “just shoes.”
But a powerful emotional experience? A soul-stirring concert? A moment of true intimacy?
That stays.

Experience Over Ownership: What the Science of Happiness Tells Us

Multiple studies in positive psychology, especially the work of Dr. Thomas Gilovich at Cornell, show that experiences bring more lasting happiness than material goods. In fact:

Experiences are more likely to be socially shared, strengthening relationships (Gilovich et al., 2014)
They are integrated into a person’s identity, while possessions remain external
Experiences evoke more emotional storytelling and reflection, reinforcing memory encoding and meaning

This is because experiences activate more regions of the brain associated with emotional processing, autobiographical memory, and prosocial neurochemicals like oxytocin and serotonin. The anterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, and insula light up during meaningful experiences, helping us locate ourselves in time, body, and relationship.

And when you compare the two—material vs. experiential—it becomes clear:
Ownership creates status. Experience creates depth.

Materialism Is a Cultural Illusion—Not a Biological Need

We often conflate wealth with happiness, but psychological data shows that beyond a certain point—roughly $75,000 to $95,000 per year depending on cost of living—additional income does not correlate with increased emotional well-being (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010). Once basic needs and a sense of security are met, more doesn’t equal better.

In fact, studies show that high materialism is negatively correlated with well-being. People who center their identity around what they own often experience:

Lower life satisfaction
Higher anxiety and depression rates
Reduced empathy and relationship quality
(Kasser, 2002)

Why? Because materialism is inherently externalizing—your worth is tied to things outside yourself. But meaningful experience is internalizing—it becomes part of who you are.

You don’t remember what phone you had in 2016.
But you remember that road trip with your best friend.
You remember what it felt like to be loved, to lose, to risk, to dance barefoot in the rain.

Stuff Doesn’t Touch the Nervous System. Experience Does.

Here’s the bottom line: your nervous system doesn’t care what you own. It cares what you feel.

A luxury handbag doesn’t soothe your vagus nerve.
An expensive watch doesn’t help your prefrontal cortex regulate stress.
But a warm hug does.
Laughter with someone you trust does.
The scent of your grandmother’s house. A song that moves you to tears. A shared silence with someone who just gets you.

These are the things that regulate your physiology, expand your consciousness, and strengthen your sense of self and connection. They co-regulate your body and encode emotional memory, reinforcing what psychologist Barbara Fredrickson calls “positivity resonance.”

In other words: stuff doesn’t become you.
But felt experience does.

You Only Get This Body Once: The Neuroscience of Embodiment and Mortality

One of the most grounding truths I come back to—over and over—is this:
You only get this body once.

Not in a fearful way. Not to create urgency or scarcity.
But in the most reverent, awe-filled way imaginable.

This body—this beating, breathing, sensing form—is your only medium for experiencing life on Earth. Without it, there is no taste of mango, no orgasm, no laughter-induced cramp in your side. There’s no touch, no music, no smell of summer rain on asphalt. There’s just… stillness. Mystery. Maybe something else, maybe nothing.

But while you’re here?
Your body is your access point to everything.

The Nervous System: A Living Interface for Sensory Reality

Your body isn’t just a vessel—it’s a highly intelligent, highly sensitive interface designed to translate the external world into felt experience.

Your nervous system, made up of over 90,000 miles of nerves, functions like a living electrical network. It constantly transmits signals from your environment to your brain through sensory neurons—detecting heat, texture, motion, sound waves, chemicals in the air, pressure, and more. This input is routed through your brainstem and relayed to higher processing centers like the somatosensory cortex, insula, and thalamus.

Touch activates Merkel cells, sound engages mechanoreceptors, and emotional resonance is transmitted via the vagus nerve, which also links to your heart rate, breathing, and even immune function.

You aren’t just in a body—you are a body, and that body is alive with perception.

Even your emotions are embodied: research by Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) shows that feelings aren’t simply “brain events,” but patterns of physical activation interpreted by your brain through interoception—the sense of your internal physiological state. That lump in your throat when you’re about to cry? That fluttering before you kiss someone? That wave of calm from someone stroking your back? Those aren’t metaphors. They’re biological realities.

So many people live above the neck—cut off from their body as if it’s an accessory to their mind. But your body isn’t a machine to control. It’s your instrument of presence. It’s the only way you get to touch, be touched, and feel what it means to be human.

Mortality as Magnifier, Not Threat

Knowing you only get this body once isn’t about panic.
It’s about perspective.

Studies in thanatology (the psychology of death and dying) and existential positive psychology show that an awareness of mortality can actually increase life satisfaction and intensify presence (Yalom, 2008; Wong, 2020). When you face the reality that your time is finite, your attention sharpens. You notice the warmth of your tea. You take the long hug. You breathe a little deeper. You show up.

This is called the mortality salience effect—a term from Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al., 1986)—which suggests that contemplating death can motivate people to live more intentionally, ethically, and sensually.

And it’s true. When you remember that your time here is limited—not in a doom-and-gloom way, but in a clear-eyed, awake way—you start to focus less on perfection, performance, or possession. And more on direct experience.

You start to ask:
What does it feel like to be here, now?
What textures, tastes, voices, and glances am I missing while chasing meaning?

This Is the Only Body That Will Ever Feel This

You may believe in an afterlife, in reincarnation, in spirit.
That’s beautiful. But even if something exists beyond this—this exact body, with its particular history, laugh, voice, and heartbeat? It’s once in a lifetime.

There will never be another version of you with:

These fingerprints
This nervous system
This exact wiring of memory and sensation
This timeline, these people, these first kisses, these last moments

That means the kiss you haven’t had yet, the mountain you haven’t climbed, the sound of someone saying “I love you” that hasn’t reached your ears yet—you get one shot to feel those through this body.
Not as a concept. Not as a spirit. But as a living creature of bone, blood, nerve, and skin.

So it’s not that your body is fragile and temporary and therefore tragic.
It’s that your body is rare and irreplaceable, and therefore sacred.

You only get this body once. And it’s not your job to use it up.
It’s your invitation to live inside it as fully as you possibly can.

From Curiosity, Not Crisis: The Science of Wondering Without Suffering

I’ve never asked this question because I was falling apart or hoping for some existential rescue.

I asked because I’m curious. Because I care.
Because I find it absolutely wild and beautiful that we exist at all.

Contrary to popular belief, people don’t only explore existential questions in times of trauma or crisis. In fact, existential exploration can come from a place of strength, cognitive complexity, and deep engagement with life.

Psychologically, this is referred to as existential openness—a trait characterized by comfort with ambiguity, depth, paradox, and the unknown. Research in personality psychology (McCrae & Costa, 1997) connects this to the “Openness to Experience” domain in the Big Five personality model. People who score high here are more likely to:

Engage in deep philosophical or spiritual questions
Reflect on the nature of life, consciousness, and death
Experience wonder and awe regularly
Tolerate uncertainty without becoming distressed

In other words, asking “What’s the point of all this?” isn’t always a sign of crisis. It can be a sign of cognitive maturity and existential vitality.

Philosopher Alan Watts once said, “The meaning of life is just to be alive.” But even arriving at that simple truth often requires asking the question in the first place—not to fix anything, but to appreciate the complexity of being here.

And neuroscience backs this up too. Studies have found that curiosity activates the dopaminergic reward system, especially in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens—the same regions involved in pleasure, novelty, and motivation (Gruber et al., 2014). So when you ask a question like “What is the purpose of life?”, your brain actually lights up with anticipatory reward. You’re not suffering—you’re exploring. And that exploration itself feels good.

I’ve always felt that.
I’m not here to numb out or run on autopilot. I want to know what this life is, and what it feels like.
Not because I’m broken, but because I’m awake.

And the more I explore, the more I land on this truth:
We’re here to experience things we can only experience in this body, in this form, at this moment.

So no, this isn’t a cry for help.
It’s a love letter to aliveness.When I say I’ve always thought about the purpose of life, it’s never been from a place of despair.

My Purpose Now: To Live Through My Senses

I didn’t come here to perform life. I came here to inhabit it.

This isn’t about optimizing productivity or climbing ladders. It’s about embodied presence—letting life move through me in full color and full feeling. And science backs this up.

Neuroscience shows that the brain prioritizes emotionally salient and sensory-rich experiences when encoding long-term memory. The amygdala, which tags emotional intensity, interacts with the hippocampus to consolidate those experiences into lasting memory (McGaugh, 2004). This is why you remember the exact way someone touched your face when you needed comfort, but not the shirt you wore last Tuesday.

It’s not about luxury. It’s about impact—how deeply an experience imprints on your nervous system. This is known as embodied memory, or somatic encoding—the process through which the body literally stores felt experiences (van der Kolk, 2014). The more emotionally and sensorily engaged you are, the more meaning you assign to the moment.

Which brings me to what really stays with us.

Because at the end of it all—the titles, the promotions, the designer shoes, the curated social media presence—none of that activates your nervous system in a meaningful, lasting way.

But what does?

The way your hands moved over skin during an intimate moment
The way your chest rose and fell next to someone in stillness
The flavor of food cooked by someone who loved you
The weight of your body collapsing into a hug you didn’t know you needed
The eye contact that said I see you without a word

These are stored in your interoceptive network—the system that keeps track of your internal state—and are processed through the insula, a region associated with self-awareness, empathy, and visceral memory. These sensations are layered into your lived identity. They become you.

As psychologist Daniel Kahneman notes in his work on the “experiencing self” vs. the “remembering self,” we do not remember life by how long it lasted, but by how deeply it was felt.

So while our culture may tell us that legacy is built through output, capital, or prestige—biology suggests it’s built through intensity of presence.

And that can’t be bought.
It can only be lived.

Final Thought: We’re Here to Feel

When people talk about the meaning of life, they often look up—toward the stars, the cosmos, the infinite. But I think it’s more grounded than that. More embodied.

The purpose of life isn’t to reach some transcendent plane or solve the riddle of the universe.
It’s to experience what it means to be alive in this fragile, finite body.

To be human is to feel.
To have skin that can tingle. Eyes that can water. Arms that can hold.
To eat fruit warmed by the sun. To hear someone call your name like it matters.
To tremble with laughter or grief or joy and know—this is what it means to be alive.

This is supported not just by poetic reflection but by hard science.
Studies in hedonic psychology and experiential well-being consistently show that life satisfaction isn’t determined by wealth or status, but by the quality and depth of experiences, particularly those tied to connection, meaning, and sensory engagement (Kahneman & Deaton, 2010; Fredrickson, 2001).

And when it’s all over, we won’t remember the stuff.
We’ll remember the feeling of being alive.

Because the body doesn’t archive your résumé.
It remembers the moments when your soul caught fire, when your chest ached with beauty, when your senses were so saturated with life that you forgot to ask what it all means.And maybe—just maybe—that is what it means.

Jocelyn Kate

16–24 minutes