How To Find Your Life’s Purpose?
Life is strange. What is its purpose? This question will hit you when you’re at your breaking point. When it’s hard and you can barely see the end of it. Especially, when you’re doing the work you hate. Why do you do this? For whom?
INTRODUCTION
This is not going to be a simple text, so take your time. Read it twice or what’s even better — come back to it in a day or two. There might be points you agree with and there might be some you won’t. Write a comment if you found it interesting or whether you disagree with everything written here.
Let’s begin.
MOST COMMON PURPOSES
If you never thought about this question, your answer might be one of the following: a family, a good career, finishing school, finding the right person, believing in God.
Finding your life’s purpose would mean that after you achieve it, you can die. And if you can achieve it, can we even call that a purpose?
Imagine getting everything you wanted, finding your purpose. Now what? There is no way you’ll just lie around doing nothing. You will eventually move on to find a new thing.
Therefore, the purpose should not be something you can achieve. If it’s achievable it’s better to call it “life goals”. They can be so strong that they give you a false sense of purpose.
GOD-GIVEN PURPOSE
Believing in something more is important to many people. I must clarify here that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in anything except what we have here in this life. Therefore, finding a purpose in God can’t be my purpose and it should not be a believer’s purpose either. Let’s explain why.
Imagine your whole life believing that your life is not yours to guide. That it belongs to someone else. People like me are not willing to accept that all their actions are already predetermined. Others do and for them experiences here on Earth aren’t important. Can you even call that living?
The God-given purpose is the worst of all the purposes. It’s an excuse for doing atrocities in the name of someone else. It’s an ingredient for war, terrorism, murder, exclusions, restriction of freedom. Some of the worst acts in human history have been done in the name of God and are still done. The explanation is simple: people with God’s given purpose cherish this purpose more than the life of others or their own.
HUMANS WANT TO HAVE A PURPOSE
Our mind is always seeking for a deeper meaning. It wants to find our purpose, because this is our way of connecting, or at least we think that it connects us, to life. We’re trapped in our psychological structure instead of the process of life.
Our thoughts and emotions have become far more important than our life.
We create a frame inside which we live, what we call purpose, because we are too afraid of letting it go.
PURPOSE DOESN’T EXIST
This was extremely difficult for me to comprehend and I still occasionally struggle with it.
Life has no purpose. Life should never have any purpose, except for the life itself. The purpose of life is life and to live life. Nothing else. The beauty of life is that it can create life. There never was and never will be any need of a creator. Life is a creation and a creator in one. Only life can create life and this we call the process of life.
We’ll speak about the origins of life in another article.
If you have found a purpose, you live in a lie. If your purpose took over your way of thinking and if it’s shaping your actions you’re insane. Maybe following your purpose gives you a sense of direction, security, brings light to your darkness, makes you feel alive and yet you are not living.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO LIVE?
We must differentiate the ambiance of life and life. The ambiance is everything around you, your friends, your work, going to parties, birthdays and other social events. It means taking pictures for social media to show you’re living well. But this is not living.
Life by itself is the only thing we know, it’s the only thing you can be certain of when you wake up and yet it is so intricate we can never know its entirety. You will never be able to see all the life on this planet, but you should give your best to see as much as you can. Everything else but life is just our imagination.
Your only duty is to live totally, exploring all the aspects of life.
YOU ARE WORTHLESS
No person on this planet will live forever. There is no person that we will remember forever. Everyone will be gone. You and I as an individual are worthless. If we were gone, nothing would change.
And yet you and I are extremely important. We are part of life. That makes us something more. We are the purpose in ourselves. We’re other people’s purpose as well.
MEANING OF LIFE
Life has no meaning and does not need to have meaning. It’s your mind’s fault trying to find one and it’s your job to stop it from finding the wrong one or any at all so to speak.
Simply enjoy that you are alive.