Making a Difference

What's your ultimate motivation?

I was asked this question recently, and my first impulse was to say something trite, like, "to save the world." It's a harder question than it seems at first though. Really, how many of us stop and think about the reasons for all our actions? Something about the question really stuck with me, and I've been thinking about the answer for the past few day. What is the motivation that drives me, that makes me, me? I would like to say that it is something noble and self-sacrificing, like working to save the world, or to help people, or to stop global warming, but I think that not only are those incredibly broad categories, they are also narrow at the same time and even shallow and single-faceted in a way. Because really, how can someone ignore self-preservation and the biological imperative for self-interest to focus solely on something like helping others? And wouldn't the aspect of life that makes them WANT to help others actually be their ultimate motivation, not the desire itself?

I would like to say that my "ultimate motivation" is the search for truth. This can take many forms, like not being very good at all the little white lies that we tell each other in our daily social interactions, to the more broad search for the truth about the meaning of life. I feel like in my recent life here at college, most of my choices have been striving to find the meaning and identity of God--is there a God, and if there is, who is (S)he? How can there be so many different ideas about religion--they can't all be right, can they? How do our ideas about God and religion affect our relationships with the people and world around us? It seems like the more I read and the more ideas I learn about, the more questions I have. But I keep searching, because even if there is no objective truth, I feel the need to determine some subjective ideas that I can accept, even if they aren't necessarily the opinions of the majority.

So, there's that--my overwhelming question that affects all my choices. But thinking about that leads to yet another question, can these ultimate motivations change? And if they do, are you still the same person you were? According to one of my best friends, you can't really change who you are--all you can change is how you go about accomplishing your goals. In other words, you can mature and change how you go about achieving said motivation, but you can't actually change what it is. I don't know how I feel about that. I feel like I've grown so much in the past year, especially, that I'm not at all the same person that I used to be. I don't think it would even have occurred to the me of last year to try to determine what was making me act the way I do. But maybe the fact that I wasn't aware of it doesn't necessarily mean that the motivation wasn't there.

So, what's your motivation? Has it changed, or do we continue to be driven by the same things throughout our lives?