Mindless Orchestrations of Purpose

This title comes from comments I left somewhere, which I will reduce and combine like this:

... apart from the fleeting joy we might give others, I would agree our individual lives are fairly pointless. The main thing is to enjoy the life you have ... You aren’t solitary ... You participate ... in the great mindless orchestration of humanity, and by being essentially a good person (i.e. doing no intentional harm) you make the orchestration’s harmony a wee bit sweeter.

I admire few philosophers as much as Epicurus. His ideas are very comforting and don't require much work. A contemporary of Alexander the Great, he pretty much said the only real purpose of life is to enjoy it. People often misinterpret this as some sort of shallow selfishness, but it is not. I see it as a sort of kinder and gentler Objectivism. Taking care of yourself and the people you love is all there is to a good life. (So long as you're not a psychopath with "good" defined by your lack of empathy.)

Off and on over the past two and a half years of providing safety and stability for a large family that had been undercut by a skilled embezzler, I would wonder what my motivations really were. Did it answer some need to rescue? Was it to bolster my struggling sense of self-worth? Was it to earn my place in whatever constellation I thought I wanted to join? Was it in response to some godly command to protect the weak? Yes, all of those, at some point or other, but only briefly. When most challenged by the circumstances, I would not be able proceed if I didn't really want to. Not without incurring layers of contrary feeling that would add up to resentment and dysfunction. I avoided such feelings because everything I did gave me pleasure -- the pleasure of giving in love, and maintaining for myself a situation I wanted to keep.

Our budget is not yet balanced, I've incurred debt to work off, and my employer is entering a shrinking phase that will probably have me looking for a job elsewhere within a year, and yet I'm too happy to let any of that bother me. Because we have not let things break, and we have been real enough about why we are doing what we are doing, and there is no dysfunction (white lies, dirty secrets, habits of nondisclosure, thin layers of distrust, etc.), and we share an exciting vision and have the confidence to face it, these fairly mindless orchestrations of purpose have worked out just fine.