on purpose

There is nothing you hear more in your twenties than the grievances associated with the path toward finding your purpose. Purpose, or the guiding light and value of your life, your singular and linear experience, operates within and provides meaning for what we do here. We hear this all the time, right? I need to find my purpose, what could it possibly be?

It might be important to distinguish early on that I am not referring to a ‘sense of purpose’ or a reason to get out of bed in the morning. With this, we’re asking a different question entirely. We’re asking what reason do I need to feel motivated, what can I use to fuel the fire that I need to do what I hope to do? There are innumerable reasons to get up, but these don’t address the direction of life. Instead, they serve as intrinsic or even extrinsic motivators. Not life’s purpose, but simply practical stimulation to move forward.

Instead, what I’m hoping to tackle is this question of life’s purpose; of evaluating early on in our lives the path we intend to take or which was set out for us to follow. We’re not asking to form meaning in our individual experiences, we’re asking for a guideline, a direction to send ourselves towards, a goalpost we hope to achieve. Often, without realizing, we’re asking for some higher sense that our lives are fated to be more than just a life. We’re asking ‘why am I here?’

We might believe that there is an answer to this philosophical question that is unique to us; unchanging and rooted in this mission we’re set to accomplish while we live on Earth. We may find this meaning in our engagements with the world, usually in how we behave and what we do. But they are not definite, and they are certainly not universal. 

I have lived a relatively short time on this planet but long enough to know that this messaging is both unhelpful and inaccurate. To suggest that we inherit a purpose for our lives, must in some way be rooted in the idea that our birth was formed with intent, which some religious beliefs account for with an intelligent and well-planned omnipotent creator. Otherwise, we have to assume that the idea of purpose is an entirely human phenomenon, and is therefore self-imposed and culturally maintained. 

Even as we abandon the idea of a soul-prescribed meaning, we have to ask ourselves what purpose is actually for. Is it to guide us? To align us with a calling? Or is it a way of justifying our lives? Do we believe that we are unjustified without it? Is it possible to fail at life if you don’t find one? Or if you don’t live up to the one you’ve settled on?

The assumption that there is an inherent characteristic of purpose which involves meaning and direction might be the biggest lie you’ve ever been told. This trait of purpose is presented in a way that somehow provides this value to our lives, as if without it there is no value at all.

The issue of this presentation is two-fold. The first problem is the assumption that our lives need a purpose to be valuable and second is the idea of purpose itself, as if we have one singular and unchanging attribute that makes us worth something. 

The first is our most problematic, likely, in my estimation, housed in the tightly knitted myth that our output is more significant than our existence. We believe, as we are told, that we are what we do, and that the value we add to our lives is found first in servitude and second in the hierarchy imposed by social customs. 

So, this is my convoluted way of saying that we have, in part, been made capitalism’s doormat. It’s not a nice way to live, being made to believe that our value is contingent on this wider contribution to output and profit. We’ve confused, at no fault of our own, the words purpose and production, or maybe even occupation.

So the mission, we believe, begins in finding this purpose, what we are to the world and aligning ourselves is then giving ourselves some sense of fulfillment. Do we know which box we are trying to check? Can the boxes change?

But as we search, as we grasp our hands into open air and hope to catch purpose, are we asking ourselves what this purpose is truly for? Why am I searching for what I know will change? Is it even necessary for me to have it?

I do not think our births are intertwined with an enlistment in this type of man-hunt. I have not been asked, in being born, to spend as much of my life worrying about what I ought to be doing, than I am to actually be doing it. My biology has not been taught the customs of our late-stage capitalistic oligarchy. My consciousness was not imposed with the requisite of accomplishment in order to come into fruition. I just ‘was’, and ‘am’, and might even ‘will be’. That’s all I’m guaranteed upon arriving here. 

So there's that. That the very value of my life remains unchanged if I hold a sense of purpose or not. I have found far more meaning after liberating myself from the assumption that I ought to find one. I have such a loose grip on anything other than right now anyways, why try to look at the wider life un-lived? If you ask me, purpose is a fool’s game, and we’ve long been made to be foolish. 

Now we end up at this second issue, the idea of singular meaning. I hope, with as much love as I can offer, that we are all able to have a hard time summing up our lives. I hope we are able to do and be many things and to experience all that this life has to offer. That singular meaning is a tad reductive when we think of all the versions we have, will, or could be. 

The only singular purpose I could stumble upon in all my reflection is to exist. The happenstance of our being is miracle enough, a miracle worth justifying our space on the earth. We are not to behave in any singular way to mark our deservingness. Our birth has granted us this. That is all that we’ve been asked to do.

So beyond that generalization, I believe we would begin to fail in the process of assigning any universal meaning to our lives, or a meaning that expands and covers the scope of our intended direction. Who are we to assign that anyways? 

There are many things I have come to believe are none of my business. God, why consciousness exists, the purpose of suffering and the burden of our sense of purpose are among those damned to the graveyard of unanswerable questions. I’ve spent at least half of my life asking them, and the other half burying them before they can ask to be answered. The latter half has been far more satisfying. 

I hear my peers, my friends, and my loved ones feel that they are at a deficit because they cannot see 40 years into the future and sum up a life that hasn't happened yet. I only wish we knew how little we needed to have figured out. In all my searching I have decided that today is good enough. What are you doing today? Who are you going to be at this moment? This line of questioning makes far more sense to me. To ask in the active moment ‘how am I showing up right now?’ seems far more productive than predicting a future that is just as reliant on time and change as it is our imagination.

The problem with purpose is that we extend the scope of our being beyond what we know to be true. We compare ourselves with a theoretical life that is both singular and probably really fucking boring. We rid ourselves of the richness of what we have been given in our births, in our consciousness and we forget that we are really not the folks who should be governing this; the existential sense that our lives have one solid truth and we should spend our lives pursuing it.

If we begin to operate in this belief, we begin to engage with the economy of purpose and the currency of meaning. This is a system reliant on trading our sense of the world with the ‘gold standard’. This is a value set to the standard of “a life worth living” and defined in part by yourself and by the world you live in. When we abandon this gold standard, we no longer reduce our lives to this exchange, and instead become wealthy in our pursuit of daily engagement and an accumulated sense of self that cannot be predicted nor can they be brought to fruition simply by request. 

So this whole essay, this long-winded batch of words is really just here to say that this lie you’ve been told about having or needing a purpose is not worth believing in. Alternatively, you can look to form meaning on your own, in the small ways we encounter in our real, lived lives, which occurs in seconds, not hours or even days. We can remind ourselves of our life’s direction as simply aging, and we can count on the alignment of our lives around this. 

We know that we’ll spend our time chasing goals, achieving what we hope to achieve, loving, grieving and all of these things will happen in multifaceted and incommunicable ways. We can set forth on setting goals that make sense to us now but with the knowledge that they too will come and go and the purpose we set for today is likely not the purpose of tomorrow. What more proof do you need that this was an evaluation we simply weren’t set to make?