My purpose in life is to acquire knowledge. Also, to deepen my sense of wonder. There are so many wonderful, fascinating things to learn, but we get so feckin distracted by work and traffic and money and keeping up with the Joneses, etc that we waste our lives.
My grandparents were intelligent people, but were frustrated by their lack of education. Both were born in Essex in the 1920s and left school at 14. Like most working-class Brits of that generation, they worked hard, raised loads of kids, and had no time for books or learning. I remember how much it upset them. I am so lucky to have had the education I did, and I'm so lucky to have any book I want delivered to my door.
My purpose in life, now, is to learn as much as I can, read as many great books as I can, and live the rest of my life in a state of wonder. I don't plan to do anything with that knowledge. And I've grown out of the need to impress people. I want it for its own sake.
There is SO much I don't know. I know nothing about astronomy, for example. I'm also ignorant about genetics, DNA, geology, quantum mechanics, evolution, etc, etc. I want to study philosophy, art history, ancient philosophy. And I want to learn Russian and Latin. I've got Carl Sagan's Cosmos (both the book and the DVD), as well as books by Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox, David Attenborough, Carlo Rovelli, etc lined up. And I want to re-read Bill Bryson's history of science.
I've also compiled a list (using Harold Bloom as a guide) of the great works of literature. Though I have two literature degrees, there are SO many books I've never read. I've never read Bleak House or Middlemarch or Wuthering Heights or Catch 22 or Brave New World or Frankenstein or Wordsworth's Prelude or Woolf's To the Lighthouse. I've never read a word of George Eliot, Tolstoy, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Daniel Defoe, Proust, H. G. Wells, Goethe, Trollope, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Milton, Chaucer, Wilfred Owen, Cervantes. The list really is endless.