o sung wu,

By now you would be aware of the onset of melancholy. Just get out and do something, preferably a comely young woman, but failing that get out of the house anyhow.

People used to meet out in the street, but mass produced cars took over that social space.

The mainstream churches offer social contact. Spirituality is an inside experience. Rolling up at the church doesn't hurt, the congregation are meeting their social/support needs too.

The "point" of existence is existence itself.
Whenever and however Life began, it does now exist, and despite the addictive/attractive old beliefs in a Higher Being, a leftover from our ignorant and fearful past, there really is no Higher Purpose, we are simply the latest carriers of our genes and have no other reason to exist than to create the next generation of carriers, "and that's all she wrote".
That may not suit our egos but it is a fact.
Those who fail to do so are existentially irrelevant, also-rans in the great race of Life, other than in how they affect those who do create the new Life.
I cannot help but think that if everyone could accept this simple truth then the world would be a far better place, and a far happier one, the search for/belief in a higher purpose has led to most of the suffering in out history, and current condition.

Dear Bruce,

<<the search for/belief in a higher purpose has led to most of the suffering in out history, and current condition.>>

Maybe, Maybe not, but one thing it surely does is to compete with the search for a lower purpose.

<<I cannot help but think that if everyone could accept this simple truth then the world would be a far better place, and a far happier one>>

That lower purpose has already increased this planet's population to over 7.2 billion humans. Just imagine what would happen if everyone accepted this "simple truth" and procreated even more, like rabbits... This is not a better world, nor will it end happily.

"Lower purpose" would seem to me to be meaningless in this context, no-one who isn't mentally disturbed thinks of such things as real surely?
What you thus attribute I see as merely our failings as a species, our "Intelligence" failing to deal with our genetic heritage.
I'm not advocating ever-increasing populations, far from it, I merely posit that continuing to exist requires babies to be born, that's somewhat self-obvious isn't it?
Humanity is the same as any other species of life, the more young that survive the more the population grows, the less resources there are to share and the meaner the resultant competition becomes, that's just "the nature of the beast" unfortunately.
We have "progressed" to where natural forces no longer eliminate a significant proportion of our young, we cannot supply endless resources to support this growth and are thus in a situation where we must either limit births or accept societal breakdown and environmental collapse, that too is just "the nature of the beast".
The universe doesn't care, we have no intrinsic "right" to exist, we either accept some sort of limitations or we will inevitable cease to exist, completely or certainly in the fashion we now see as "normal".
Mother Nature has a tendency to right imbalances, usually harshly, and we are just begging for her to STOMP on us by the way we are currently going, and TBH, I can't realistically see us changing in time to forestall her, can you?
If Humanity survives the next thousand years or so at all I foresee our times becoming a semi-mythical "Golden Age", one where our Hubris destroyed all we had achieved.

The body is what dna uses, to pass itself from generation to generation.

‘morning o-sung-wu,

An interesting philosophical question, seems like you are at a point where you recognize your mortality. Unfortunately, it seems the only one of the 4.2 million biological life forms on this planet is capable of asking that question?

It’s hardly democratic that we get to both ask the question and answer it on behalf of the other 4.19 million life forms?

As to the question of “purpose”, this is a product of our intellectual awareness and is a valid but irrelevant question, except as an intellectual excercise. It should be interesting to see some of the responses.

For me I believe in immortality. My interpretation of this is that we live on through our children, by the values we impart to them, the quality our interaction with other humans, our contributions to our society and through meaningful education. These are all part of the legacy we leave behind when we shuffle of as dust.

I don’t believe we should read more into our very temporary existence, other than we are a product of the ability of our universe to convert energy into matter.

The really neat thing is that when we do return to stardust, we will never even know.