Finding Your Purpose in Life#

What is your purpose in life? Do you know? If not, why not? Oh? You haven’t found it yet. I see.

Fueled by books and YouTube videos and seminars and other such influences many people have come to believe that to be happy in life they must find their purpose. They believe, as these influences tell them, that we each have some innate purpose. That we were placed on Earth to fulfill that purpose. We are then told we need to first seek to find that purpose, then to align your work and lives with that purpose. And, they all purport to tell you how to find that purpose. To all of this I say “BULLSHIT!”.

The reality is that our lives, in and of themselves, have no purpose. We were not placed here to fill some need. We have no divine mandate to fulfill. What we do have is an opportunity to create our lives, our purpose, by making decisions and taking action that moves us forward toward that purpose.

Heresy! You say.

No, reality. Consider this: Let’s for a moment assume that you do have some divinely defined purpose for being here. Does every single person on Earth have a similarly defined purpose? That is, are we each here for some specific reason? To fulfill some specific purpose? If so, why are we not all fulfilling our purpose? Do the people who live on the streets have a purpose? What might it be? Or, how about the poor who live in wretched huts in the middle of some drought-plagued land. Do they have a purpose?

Now, you might say, “Well, yes they have a purpose but they haven’t yet found it or have rejected it and chosen not to fulfill it.” Really? So, you’re saying that people choose to live lives of hardship and want when an alternative that promises a brighter and more abundant life is available to them? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

The alternative to this point of view is that not everyone has a divinely defined purpose. That this privilege is limited to only a few. That brings in two new questions: Why are only a few chosen? How are they chosen? And a third question: by whom are they chosen? And one more: What happens if they never find their purpose or choose to reject it? Does someone else fill the slack or does that purpose simply go unfulfilled?

All of these questions (and probably a few more I’ve considered but now forgotten) have led me to the realization that we do not, in fact, have a specific purpose in life. We were not placed here for some divine reason. We do not have an innate purpose for existing. At least not beyond the biological need to perpetuate the species.

Yet, we are encouraged to find our purpose. And this leads, in my view, to a great deal of frustration and dissatisfaction when we struggle to find our purpose. We become discouraged that our lives have little or no meaning because we cannot find our purpose. We lose interest in things because we lack purpose.

Now, that’s not to say that we cannot have a purpose in life. On the contrary. The influencers that shove this pablum down our throats are not wrong in saying that purpose gives meaning (another question to be addressed) to our lives and helps motivate us to take action. But they are wrong about where that purpose comes from. Rather than being innate or divinely inspired, our purpose comes from within. We choose our purpose. We find something that motivates us and we make a conscious decision to take that on as our purpose.

In my view, when we stop looking outside of ourselves for our purpose – that is, stop looking for some divine inspiration for our purpose and, instead, define for ourselves what our purpose should be then we can find the happiness and satisfaction that fulfilling our purpose is supposed to provide.

So, Defining our purpose in life, rather than seeking to ‘find’ our purpose should be our goal. We have the power to control our lives, to give meaning to our lives, and to define for ourselves what our purpose should be.

And that is the way it should be.