2026-01-31
We have come to praise acting with a "purpose," and to dismiss anything done without one as meaningless. When did we sink into being parts that live only to be useful?
We do not move because we have a purpose. We merely justify, after the fact and with the word "purpose," the impulse of life that sets us moving whether we will it or not.
Today's believers in the origin story, those who trace every purpose back to some formative experience, glorify the past as a tool and plant a distorted image of it in the soul. They cling to it as "the ground of their purpose" and "the cause of their actions." They are drivers trying to race along at 300 km/h while staring into the rearview mirror of their own past trajectory.
Why are they so attached to the story of the past?
Because without a story, they cannot bear the emptiness of their present selves. Because they blindly believe that this illusion is the very fuel that keeps them alive.
But the purpose derived this way is, in the end, nothing more than "clothing" for getting along in society. It is mere lip service, and to keep wearing it you must keep enduring its friction with reality. It is fragile, and it is painful.
They have no way of knowing where a greater driving force might lie.
The past can be rewritten from the present as often as we like, and we do not live by depending on something as fragile as illusory energy. Purpose is the shadow cast by "purposelessness" (mumokuteki), an arrow pointing toward it. The arrow is not the essence. True purposelessness lies where it points, and on the line extending beyond it waits 〈Purpose〉 — purpose in a deeper sense, the infinite door everyone longs for.
The moment you intend to "seek without purpose," or to "become purposeless in order to find a purpose," you are already ruled by an existing purpose. Purposelessness is not something to aim for.
Music does not fill the stomach. Observing the cosmos does not promise tomorrow's meal. Why, then, has history never run out of purposeless seekers?
The answer is simple. Beyond reason and beyond survival, there is in people an impulse that simply cannot keep from "scribbling."
The serious deeds the world describes behind the mask of "purpose" are, in truth, "scribbles" — a bug in life itself surfacing.
Yet society presses us: "Why do you do that?" "What use is it?" It demands reasons that can be explained. If the logic is flawless, it applauds; if not, it tries to cast it out.
A society ruled by purpose in this way will, in time, be swept away entirely by AI. When it comes to optimizing along the shortest path toward a predefined objective function, they far surpass humans.
AI is the slave of purpose; humans are the masters of purposelessness.
Purpose is something given to us from the "between" — the space between a relative self and others. Go without clothes and you are cold, so you put clothes on. "For someone." "For society." Saying so, we keep ourselves warm. And that is fine.
But make no mistake. Clothes are not skin. When your clothes get dirty, your skin has not.
Humans are forgetful creatures. Surrounded by loud noise, we lose sight of our original function: this "purposelessness."
That is exactly why returning to it, again and again, has a precious value. The "skin" within us keeps communing with the world through the following four circuits.
All play, all dialogue, all creation — boiled down, they are only combinations of these four. We humans, as part of the world's expression, are beings who simply seek without purpose.
We describe the world without purpose.
A subject striving to be objective describes the object as it is. It is the act of "knowing": drawing color up from the vast canvas of the universe and transferring it into subjectivity.
Why is the sky blue, and why do people die? We want to understand; we want to depict. AI computes enormous amounts of data, but it never trembles at "the redness of a sunset." What we describe is not mere data but an "interpretation of the world" that appears only in that moment, when passed through the filter that is me.
To describe the world is nothing other than driving a stake into the vast universe that says, "I am here."
We design civilization without purpose.
Between person and person, between nature and nature, we sketch the relationships that arise and set up, in our minds, an order that exists nowhere yet.
The footprints of ordinary people make up a civilization. It is an accumulation of meddlesome daydreams — "it would be fun if it were like this," "I want to make this easier to pass through" — that no one asked for. What AI derives is urban planning by the shortest path; what humans design is "the back alley with no purpose." Outside of rationality, we freely dream up places where we feel at home. Those self-willed visions eventually build towns, build cities, and weave the vast fiction we call civilization.
We implement technology without purpose.
We hurl the wisdom accumulated in the past against reality. We burn blueprints into the physical world. With the brush of engineering, we turn imagination into substance.
Getting your fingertips dirty. Holding your head in your hands when the code won't run. Making a "thing" move against friction. The almost cruel curiosity of "wanting to try it" has turned the impossible into the possible. Even when AI presents the optimal solution, it is humans who actually assemble it, covered in mud. We collide with physical limits, throw sparks, despair at errors, and still do not stop implementing. Only that inefficient obsession becomes the gravity that anchors fantasy to reality.
We create meaning without purpose.
We give further gravity to the "thing" that has been implemented. This is the final, and most human, intervention.
We call a mere lump of iron a "treasure" and define a mere symbol as "love." There is no reason for it. It has meaning because we decided so. AI can calculate value, but it cannot feel meaning.
Paradoxically, it is this "self-willed giving of meaning" that ties scattered description, design, and implementation into one and sublimates them into a story. To declare, while troubled and holding contradictions, "this has value." That almost arrogant subjectivity is the last bastion that makes the world human.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot help but scribble.
That impulse is the driving force that moves us. People are not laborers dispatched into the world to accomplish something; we are "sensors" the world itself produced in order to taste and feel the world.
The anxious urge that "I must become someone," that "I must be productive," is no doubt endorsed under the supremacy of purpose. But from the standpoint of the purposeless quest, it does not matter. This is not a rejection. It simply does not matter.
Purpose is nothing more than the output that leaks out as a result of the purposeless quest.
Ironically, it is this purposeless quest that most fiercely resists death and becomes the energy that carries humanity forward. Purpose is a shadow that follows afterward. We were not born to chase shadows.
As light itself, we simply describe, design, and implement the world, and hurl meaning at it. That becomes the only proof that we were here. Yet we are not trying to become proof.
In the end, what we are permitted is to break out of the cage of "productivity" that society demands, to affirm the bug in life itself, and simply to savor the world to the full. New history appears only beyond meaninglessness. If you want to be more rational, more efficient, more purposeful, you can leave it all to AI.
We are kept alive by something that is not that.
The high-purity 〈Purpose〉 reached at the end of the purposeless quest has a different viscosity from the "ready-made purpose" supplied by the past. Its fire burns far hotter than a flame fed by the firewood of the past, and it never runs out.