The Purpose of Life

I am on a business trip now with my decent IBM ThinkPad X41, which is a perfect machine with the exception of the lack of a numeric keypad, which makes me incapable to enter Chinese with Q9 input method.

Everything when I am aboard, I always try to finish reading a book to kill the travel time. This time, I have just completed one called The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom.

The book is all about an old guy who is going to die (or already dead?), has met several persons waiting for him in "Heaven", and each of them represents an important part of the old guy's past life, and thus brings out the main theme that each person, no matter being big or small, important or trivial, will always has his/her own meaning of life.

You can treat this book as a novel for light reading. On the other hand, it could be a very "heavy" book, which is about serious subjects like the meaning or the purpose of life.

Among all the people from different nations that I have met, I often have the impression that people from Hong Kong, including myself, have the least sense of developing a "meaningful" life.

It is true that we all study, play and work extremely hard but what's the purpose behind such a hard-working life? We always strive to achieve higher marks in exams, to score higher or kill more rivials in online games, and to make more bucks to afford luxury items like latest DCs, PCs, cars or even apartments. However, after all, are we happier than before?

Should we slow down our pace a bit to enjoy life? Should we spend more time with our relatives, good friends or on community works, rather than chasing those never-ending achievements?

In the end, I don't want to meet nobody or just the pop-stars in my after death.

I don't have a clue yet, do you?