The Philosophers Almost Got It.
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For thousands of years, humanity’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with a single, unyielding question: Why do we exist?
Their answers were varied, eloquent, sometimes brilliant. But nearly all of them missed something — something hiding in plain sight, embedded in the very act of asking the question.
Below is a brief tour through some of the most celebrated and contrasting visions of human purpose. My goal is not to exhaust the topic, but to show you how, despite all their differences, each of these thinkers brushed against a universal truth without fully seeing it.
Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
He was right about the value of reflection. But he overlooked something essential: we don’t examine our lives out of intellectual duty. We examine them because we feel curiosity. Because we feel discomfort in what remains unquestioned. Because we feel satisfaction when something finally makes sense.
Aristotle proposed that the aim of human life is eudaimonia — often translated as “happiness” or “flourishing.”
He came impressively close to the truth. But he still treated happiness as something to be reached, rather than the fundamental experience that makes any aim worth pursuing.
Friedrich Nietzsche declared that we must create our own values, that we must become who we are.
He was right about the importance of self-creation, but he didn’t see clearly that we create values because we feel that some ways of being are better than others. Even his notion of the “will to power” is, at its core, about a feeling — the feeling of strength, vitality, authenticity.
Eastern philosophers came even closer.
The Buddha taught that suffering arises from attachment and that liberation comes from recognizing the impermanence of all experiences.
He was right about the importance of understanding the nature of experience, but he emphasized transcending feeling rather than recognizing that the desire to transcend is itself… a feeling.
Lao Tzu spoke about living in harmony with the Tao, the natural flow of existence.
He was right about the futility of resisting our fundamental nature. But he didn’t fully articulate that we recognize alignment with the Tao because we feel it — when we are in harmony, and when we are not.
Clarice Lispector, though not an academic philosopher, remains one of Brazil’s most profound existential voices. Her writing peels back the human soul with poetic ferocity, revealing meaning in the everyday and the extraordinary alike.
“The meaning of life is simply to be alive. It is so plain, so obvious, so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”
Clarice reminds us of the obvious simplicity of living.
But why is “being alive” meaningful? Because life is the source of all feeling. The frantic rush, the hunger for something “beyond” — these come from the feeling that something is missing, that life in its raw state is not enough. Clarice invites us back to the sensation of being alive, uncluttered by external demands.
Rubem Alves — Brazilian theologian, philosopher, and psychoanalyst — had a rare gift for turning the abstract into the tangible. He wrote about life as an aesthetic and spiritual experience, celebrating wonder, beauty, and the courage of becoming who we already are.
“The meaning of life is to become what you are, and to know how to give thanks for the path that brought you here.”
But why become who you are? Why be grateful?
Because authenticity feels like freedom, and gratitude feels like abundance.
Living a life that is not your own feels hollow, false.
The search is always for a state of being that feels true.
And then there is Mário Quintana, whose gentle humor and quiet depth brought profound truths into simple metaphors.
“The secret is not to chase butterflies. It is to care for the garden so they come to you.”
Why care for the garden?
Because tending to yourself — your interior world, your passions — creates feelings of peace, wholeness, and attraction. Chasing butterflies (or external rewards) creates feelings of frustration and depletion. Quintana’s metaphor points toward a path that simply feels good.
And here is what all of them missed:
We are not here to solve the problem of existence.
We are here to feel existence.
Feeling is not an obstacle to understanding.
It is what makes understanding matter.
It is not something that happens after you’ve solved life’s biggest questions.
It is what makes those questions feel worth asking in the first place.
These thinkers spent centuries searching for something beyond feeling — some higher principle, deeper truth, or ultimate foundation. But feeling is the foundation.
It is the highest principle.
It is the deepest reality.
They almost got it.
Each one touched crucial aspects of the human experience.
But they missed the elegant simplicity of the answer because they were looking for something more elaborate. They failed to see the forest because they were staring at the trees.
The answer is not beyond feeling. The answer is feeling.
As you can see, great thinkers — from wildly different eras, cultures, and ways of living — each defended their own version of the answer to the big question.
They used different languages, different metaphors, and built entire systems of thought. And yet, they all share one invisible thread, a common pulse running beneath their ideas, no matter how different they appear on the surface.
We do everything because of what we feel and in pursuit of what we would like to feel.
This is irrevocable.
It is the master line of code operating in every one of us — from the first human who ever lived to you, right now, in this exact moment.
Think of humanity as a whole, and everything we have built across history.
Empires rose, wars were fought, masterpieces were created, scientific revolutions unfolded, social media happend. And beneath every action — every triumph and every tragedy — was the same engine: feeling.
