✦ Prefer to listen?
Let Human Glimmer read this one to you.
We start asking people what they want to be when they grow up before they have any idea what growing up actually means. When you’re five, the answer can be anything. You can say veterinarian because you like animals, astronaut because space is cool, or teacher because you really like your teacher. Nobody expects you to have your life figured out. They’re just curious about what sounds exciting to you right now.
Somewhere along the way, though, the question gets more serious. By the time you’re in high school, people aren’t just asking what you might like to be someday. They’re asking what you’re going to do after graduation. Are you going to college? What are you going to study? What kind of career do you want? Suddenly you’re making decisions that seem like they’re supposed to point toward the rest of your life when you’ve barely had a chance to experience much of it yet.
I think we sometimes blur two very different questions without realizing it. What do you want to do for work? becomes What do you want to do with your life? A career can absolutely be meaningful, but those questions don’t have to have the same answer. Some people find an enormous sense of purpose in their work. For others, a job is how they pay the bills while they find meaning somewhere else.
Still, there can be a strange pressure to find the thing you’re meant to do. A job you like or something you care about somehow doesn’t seem big enough. You’re looking for your purpose. The reason you’re here. What it is you’re actually supposed to do with your life.
It doesn’t help that we tend to talk about purpose as though it’s one specific thing we’re supposed to find. And whatever it is, it seems like it should be something big. Something meaningful enough to shape your life and important enough to feel like it explains what you’re doing here. You’re supposed to find it, build your life around it, and apparently keep wanting it until you die. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a hell of a lot of pressure to put on one answer, especially when some of us are still trying to figure out what we want to do tomorrow.
Maybe part of the problem is that we’ve built purpose up to be something much bigger than it actually has to be. We expect some kind of calling that we’re deeply passionate about, something that gives us a reason to get out of bed every morning and makes us feel like we’re doing something meaningful. If nothing in our lives currently fits that description, it can feel like we haven’t found our purpose yet.
Maybe there really is something you’re here to do. I don’t think we have to dismiss that possibility just because we can’t prove it, but having a purpose doesn’t necessarily mean you’re supposed to know exactly what it is. And it doesn’t mean purpose can only show up in one part of your life.
You can find purpose in raising your children and in work that matters to you. You can find it in something you create or the relationships you’ve built. There may be several parts of your life that make it feel meaningful without one of them needing to be the real purpose.
And those things can change. Something can matter deeply to you for years and eventually stop fitting the person you’ve become. That doesn’t mean it never mattered or that you were wrong to follow it. Other times, you finally reach something you were sure would give your life meaning and discover that it doesn’t. That doesn’t make getting there a mistake. It just means you know something now that you couldn’t have known before.
That’s why I’m not sure purpose is something we can figure out entirely by thinking about it. You can ask yourself what you’re meant to do until you’re sick of hearing your own thoughts and still not have an answer. Some things you only learn by actually living them.
So if you don’t know what gives your life a sense of purpose, maybe you don’t need to demand an answer from yourself yet. Pay attention to what keeps pulling you back. Notice what you care about when nobody else is telling you that you should. And don’t ignore what you’ve learned that you don’t want either. Sometimes I know I don’t want this anymore is the clearest direction you have for a while.
That doesn’t mean quitting your job and moving across the country in the name of finding yourself. You can learn something you’ve been curious about or try something you’ve kept talking yourself out of because you don’t know whether you’ll be any good at it. You can go somewhere you haven’t been before and see what happens. The point isn’t to treat every new experience like an audition for your life’s purpose. It’s to stop expecting yourself to know what matters to you without giving yourself much chance to discover it.
You don’t need to know whether something is your purpose before you’re allowed to explore it.
I also think we put so much pressure on finding meaning that we forget we’re allowed to simply be alive for a while. Not every period of your life has to be building toward some enormous goal. There may be stretches where you’re gaining experience, meeting people, or learning more about yourself without any idea what it’s all leading to. Those years aren’t automatically empty just because they didn’t have a purposeful direction.
And purpose doesn’t have to produce something impressive. We tend to give more importance to the things we can point to and say we accomplished. A career can give someone an enormous sense of purpose, but so can raising a family, creating something, or being there for the people you love. One isn’t automatically more meaningful because it’s easier to see.
Of course, it would be nice if the things that give our lives meaning also paid the bills. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t, and earning a living takes time away from the things we’d rather be doing. That doesn’t make those things any less meaningful. Your job doesn’t have to be your purpose just because it’s where you spend a lot of your time.
Maybe that’s part of why What is my purpose? can become such an overwhelming question. You’re trying to take your entire existence, including all the years you haven’t lived yet, and figure out what you’re supposed to do with it. I don’t know how the hell anyone is supposed to answer that with certainty.
So maybe make the question smaller. What matters to me right now? What do I want more of in my life? What am I curious enough to explore next?
Those answers don’t have to last forever. They’re just somewhere to start. You might find something that becomes deeply important to you, or discover that something you thought you wanted isn’t for you at all. That doesn’t mean you’re getting your life wrong. You’re actually learning more about yourself as you live it.
Of course, none of this answers whether there’s actually a reason we’re here. Maybe you believe you were put here for a reason, or that there’s some larger plan for where your life is going. Maybe you believe purpose is something we create as we live our lives. I don’t know that any of us can know for sure.
But I’m not sure you need to know. Even if there is somewhere you’re supposed to end up, you still have to live everything between here and there.
You still have to make choices without knowing where they’ll lead. Some of them will make sense while you’re living them. Others may only make sense looking back. Either way, not knowing what’s ahead doesn’t leave you with nothing to do now.
You don’t have to solve your entire life before you can live it. Figure out what matters to you from where you’re standing and give yourself opportunities to discover more. If you find something meaningful, let it matter without immediately demanding that it matter forever.
You don’t have to know where all of this is taking you. You just have to keep living enough of your life to find out.
✦ Closing Glimmer
Maybe you don’t have to know where you’re going for your life to still be going somewhere.