I've been seeing a few posts on Reddit lately about the Great Wall of China and wanted to know why it was built, other than keeping the mongolians out. Then I begun thinking about human nature and how purpose ties into it.
Could being bored or feeling purposeless lead to civilizations to undertake such large projects?
I know the Great Pyramids of Giza had many reasons for being built, one of them is to give the Egyptians a huge ego boost for their existence as well as signifying great power.
Forgive me if I sound like a 5 year old, but I've been thinking about the history of humanity from a philosophical perspective. And I've begun thinking about the notion of 'being bored with life' which leads to questioning its purpose, which ends up going down a rabbit hole of other deep questions. I figure we humans generally deal with this problem by incorporating activities such as hobbies and other projects that give our lives meaning. So for great leaders to keep their empires alive, I'd assume they keep their spirits up by undertaking great projects or creating 'feel good stories' like myths and legends to kind of keep people distracted until they die, thereby keeping their power secure.
So could the seven wonders of the world have an innate relationship with a fundamental questioning of our existence?
Bruce Trigger sums it up quite well: "the basic way [humans] symbolize power is through the conspicuous consumption of energy, control of which is the fundamental measure of power." In this case, energy being human labor used to construct monumental architecture (the category archaeologists would lump the Giza Pyramids and the Great Wall under). When archaeologists talk about monumental architecture, we usually talk about how the primary intent is to "symbolize power" and secondarily to create social order and social groups subordinate to that symbolic social power.
Monumental architecture may have some other psychological purpose, but there really isn't much evidence that building these monuments satiates some need to fill a void of meaning in human existence. The closest these monuments might come is by helping establish a sense of group identity, whether national, ethnic, or otherwise. Some sort of identity can (but doesn't necessarily) emerge from having the shared experience of being either "the people who built that huge thing" or being "the people who are descended from those who built it". That sense of group membership might be psychologically fulfilling, but we are now straying away from both my expertise and history into human psychology.