Religion. Spirituality. Philosophy. Buddhism. Meditation retreats. World travel. Fortune-tellers. Career changes. Mid-life crises. Quarter-life crises.
What do all of these things have in common?
They are things that people do, have or turn to when they are facing a crisis of purpose.
Self-actualization. Finding yourself. A quest for spiritual enlightenment.
Call it what you want. It’s all the same thing: a search for meaning. People are looking for purpose. Why do I exist? Why was I put on this planet? What am I meant to do?
‘The Purpose Driven Life’ has sold 60 million copies, making it one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time.
Guess what? It’s all smoke and mirrors.
What people really want to know is: How can I be happy?
Our modern culture has come to associate happiness with purpose. If you are living without a purpose, then you have no reason to exist. You don’t matter. And people who don’t matter are unhappy.
Well, I have news for you. There are hundreds of millions of happy people on this planet who get up every morning without wondering why they are here. They live simple lives. They have jobs to go to, chores to take care of, families to feed and care for, friends and neighbors to chat with.
And it’s enough. They exist. They live, they die. They are happy.
Why? Because they don’t have a reason not to be.
The problem is, the rest of us have more than we need. More time, more money, more energy. And we need something to do with all this excess time, money, and energy. Something that makes us feel good. Something that makes us happy.
So we start searching for a purpose.
Maybe having a purpose will make you happy, maybe it won’t. But what happens when you fail at your purpose? You decide you were wrong and start searching again. You find another purpose and fail at that too.
You fail because you are relying on the universe to make things happen. If you are meant to do something, then it has to work out, right? You don’t need to put in the effort, you don’t need to make it happen. The universe will take care of that.
Stop.
Stop waiting.
Stop making excuses.
Stop relying on the universe.
Stop looking for your purpose.
You don’t need one. Take responsibility. Forget about what you’re meant to do. Figure out what you want to do and do it.
Take control of your life. You don’t have a destiny. Choose a goal and pour your heart into it. Learn everything you can about it and put in the hard work and determination to make it happen.
Don’t give up and blame your failure on the universe. Forget about purpose.
Take action.
Not because you were meant to.
Act because you want to. Act because it makes you happy. Act because it makes others happy. Act because it’s the right thing to do.
Get religion if you think it’ll improve your life. Study philosophy. Become a Buddhist. Go to a meditation retreat. Travel the world. Visit a fortune teller. Change your career.
But don’t do it to find a purpose. Do it because you want to.
Be who you want to be. Live and be happy.
I think this is the core of so many issues right there. Make a decision. Then act on that decision. You have both the right and the responsibility to decide your life's path.
Thanks for the input. I agree. People are reluctant to make decisions and take responsibility for their own lives. There are so many options these days, and everyone wants to select the one right path that will lead to success and happiness. But you have to create those things yourself by being proactive.
Yes, I believe we do also. Otherwise life will pass us by and before we know it, we're left scratching our head wondering how that happened.
Associating happiness in life with having a purpose is the fundamental error. The truth is that most people who crave to find the "meaning of life" or who want to find out their special purpose even after having a nice comfortable life, just have a lot of time on their hands. My philosophy teacher once told us that when she was in college herself, she would think a lot about the meaning of this universe and why we are here, but now she's more focused on completing her syllabus in the stipulated number of lectures and grading papers.
Wondering about what our purpose is so flawed. There does not even have to be ONE specific purpose. Doing what makes us happy is enough. It doesn't have to be BECAUSE it's our so-called purpose. It just has to be.
True words. It doesn't matter why we exist. We just do. Overthinking it leads to unhappiness because there is no answer. Our purpose is whatever we decide it to be. Thanks for adding your thoughts!
A lot of people ask me what my plans are with my life, and they're always shocked when I tell them that I just want to do interesting things. Maybe I'll get a degree, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll visit every country, maybe I won't. Maybe I'll have kids, maybe I won't. Whatever happens, I'll be satisfied as long as I'm interested. A lot of westerners find that hard to swallow.
“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Good quote. That's a nice way to live your life. In western society, ambition is valued very highly. Everyone wants to be someone special and important. You need to have big plans and dreams for the future. Every child should dream of being the president. But ambition is a very dangerous thing. It's the reason everyone steps on each other to get ahead. It's basically the opposite of empathy. The world would be a much more peaceful place without ambition.
Contrasting ambition against empathy is a pretty interesting take. I wouldn't necessarily consider them direct opposites, although ambition often does manifest itself in a way that is antithetical to empathy. I consider myself pretty ambitious; ambitious to learn Spanish, ambitious to travel, ambitious to educate myself, but it's only for the purpose of enjoying myself, not for any kind of status that may come with the fulfilment of said ambitions. I think I'm a little younger than you; just a few weeks shy of my 28th birthday, and over the last couple of years I've grown into the idea of who I am as a person and I'm pretty comfortable with it. If other people like who that person is, awesome, but I've definitely grown out of need to be seen as "successful" or a "high achiever" in the eyes of others
You are right. I just looked at a few different definitions of ambition to see how far off I was in my thinking. The first one I came across was this: a strong desire to do or achieve something. By that definition there is certainly nothing wrong with ambition, and you and I are both ambitious.
Then I came across this one: an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment. That's more what I had in mind when I said it's basically the opposite of empathy. This is not true in the strictest sense of course, but it's more about the way that ambition manifests. People will do whatever it takes to achieve their goals of power, wealth, fame or honor, e.g. moving up the corporate ladder by pushing your colleagues down and climbing overtop of them. Or becoming president of the U.S. by inciting half the country into a racist, xenophobic, mysoginistic frenzy.
What you said about having no particular set plans struck me as lacking ambition in the sense of the second definition, not the first. I can certainly imagine that whenever you decide on your next goal, you become ambitious (the first definition), put your mind to it and get shit done. That is practical and admirable.
Yes, nearly a decade younger. :-) But being comfortable with who you are is something that often takes most people much longer, if they ever get there. So you are ahead of the pack. I think I got there somewhere around mid- to late- twenties as well. It's a good place to be!
Wow, there is some serious philosophy going on there. Love it.
Ambitious people are never happy plus they make people around them miserable. Ambition is like ego trip on steroids, don't know where to stop. It even spreads to the spiritual realm like attaining enlightenment. Future is created by the ambitious mind. The future is not part of the time as we all know it. It is part of ambition, because ambition need space to move you cannot fulfill ambition now; you can fulfill life now, not ambition. Ambition is against life, antilife. What is the purpose of life is born out this 'ambition' to understand there is something :-)
Thanks for adding some Interesting thoughts. Ambition as antilife. I offer you a quote from my own (not yet published) novel, regarding ambition:
"Ambition is the driving force of civilization and the one trait we seem to share with no other creature on this earth. [...] Ambition is our worst trait, our best trait, our most inculcated. Ambition is also unnatural. Nature tends toward a certain harmony, but ambition is violently opposed to harmony."
So I guess we are on fairly similar wavelengths with this. :-)
I've often posited that we are an evolutionary anomaly, in the sense that evolution normally gives a species just enough so survive in its environment, and no more, leaving the world's ecology in a nicely balanced symbiosis.
Somewhere along the lines, some wires were crossed and humans were created, with capabilities far greater than what we needed to survive in our environment; capabilities great enough to allow us to compound knowledge from generation to generation, ascend up the food chain despite not being particularly athletically gifted, and eventually drastically alter the world around us.
The world was never meant to support a species like us. But we're here, and I'm pretty sure most of us don't want to retreat back into the wilderness and give up houses and forks and shoes and internet and aeroplanes. So we've gotta make it work. Ambition helps make it work, but it also causes just as much, if not even more harm.
Also, in reply to your previous post, while ambition and empathy aren't directly opposites, I think it is fair to say that lack of empathy is a very common side effect of the second definition of ambition you listed there. That's why things like tall poppy syndrome exist.
@originalworks
@originalworks has become awfully unreliable!
Indeed!
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