Punx2
By Punpun
June 14, 2026
I’m starting this new series called Punpun’s guide to “__”.
The intent is not to enlighten you with my well profound thoughts or anything like that. Rather, it is to show my possibly naive college student’s perspective on big topics. I am no expert in these topics but I’ll give my best thought on it and hopefully leave you readers with an interesting take.
Starting of big with my guide on life.
It is unclear what life is or why we really exist. Is there a God? Is it all just a profound accident? Why are we here? I’ve gone through the troubles of exploding my brain thinking about this before and I will tell you right now that it is not something you can really think your way through. Any conclusion you can try to make will not be perfectly sound as these are problems which might exist outside of logic itself.
After lots of thought and many existential crises, my proposed answer is that we can’t really know. However we can still appreciate it. We don’t really know why we’re here but we might as well enjoy it whilst we can.
With that out of the way, it follows that the primary goal in life should be to enjoy it. But that, for most people, is a lot easier said than done (an might not always be possible). In my next guide, I’ll go into how to achieve happiness. But for the sake of this blog, let’s assume that you have achieved happiness. The secondary life goal should then be to make the people around you happy. Once you have achieved your primary life goal, you should seek to help others in that journey to happiness. This in turn could create a positive loop and lead to a happier world.
Being happy and creating a happier world is great. However, most of the time, happiness is only an emotional thing and not very tangible. Also it is hard to truly know whether or not someone is actually happy. That’s why I would say that creating value in general is sort of a parallel goal that goes hand in hand with making others happy. This “creating value” phrase is intentionally vague as different people might see different things as being valuable. However, the general idea of “value” is to better someone else’s life and, in a sense, allowing them to live a happier life.
Once you’ve created some sort of value, the idea is that you will hopefully indirectly inflict happiness. The most obvious form of value is work. However, work is not the only way to create value. Many things can potentially count as value so long that it inches humanity forward, no matter how small.
Many people think that money is the obvious indicator of success in life. However, under the happiness framework, wealth does not necessarily correspond to happiness. While money certainly could help with happiness, there are plenty of rich people that are not happy and plenty of poor people who are happy.
My perspective about money is similar to my perspective about happiness. The very first step should be to try to gather enough wealth to be able to support yourself. Then, any surplus gained afterwards should be used to better the lives of those around you. Notice the parallels between wealth and happiness: your primary goal should be to get yourself to a comfortable state, but afterwards you should seek to help out those around you.
I know the real world is not as simple as this. I know there are many philosophical questions around this. Should you always donate? If you reinvest the wealth you have you can donate a larger sum in the future. Is that necessarily better? Is it justified to let someone suffer today in order to save more people in the future? Maybe I’ll get to these in a future guide, but for now these problems are not as important. What is more important is your intention that once you have a surplus, you intend to use it for good.