It’s common in the Personal Development world to read about figuring out your life’s purpose. At one point, I had become obsessed with figuring out my purpose, and spent months and months trying to figure it out. Now I know some people have found a purpose, and are quite happy with what they found - I, on the other hand, despite my greatest prolonged efforts, could not come up with a purpose I was happy with.
This threw me into a state of depression, because I had no direction, and while I felt that life had meaning, the fact that I couldn’t define my purpose made me intellectually conclude that there was no meaning. This conflict in beliefs really ripped at me, and threw me into a very negative state of mind, where I wasn’t accomplishing anything. The longer I went without figuring out my purpose, the more pressure I felt to come up with one, and the more depressed I felt. It was a pretty crappy cycle.
Eventually I concluded that my purpose was just to experience. To do what I do, and just experience what’s in front of me. No larger goal, no great accomplishment, and in fact - no way to fail. I just don’t buy into the whole “define your purpose” idea. At the time, I felt I needed to give some answer to the question of “What is my life’s purpose?”, so the answer of just experiencing this reality seems like a great one.
One day I was talking to my friend, and we wandered on to the subject of purpose. He told me that he had spent months trying to figure out his purpose, and all it did was depress him. I was amazed! I told him the same thing happened to me, and that my eventual conclusion was to just relax and experience reality. His eventual conclusion was just to let it go, and forget about it.
I think that defining your purpose might be a useful tool for some people. For me, it wasn’t useful at all. All it did was make me feel forced to move in one direction, when what I really felt was that I wanted to move in all directions at once. The idea of defining a purpose for me felt like it restricted my freedom. Any time I would come up with a purpose, I always looked at the opposite of that purpose, and felt like I would be missing out if I forced myself in a direction.
For example, I read Steve Pavlina’s blog, and he has a lot of ideas that have helped me, and provoked thought. His purpose is: “to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace”. That sounds pretty nice. But when I tried it on for myself, my response was: what if I need to make a cowardly decision at some point? What if I need to be mean and selfish at some point? What if I wake up, and one day I don’t feel like awakening any great spirits in others? What if I need to leave this world in anger?
Then my purpose wouldn’t be serving me at all! You might say to yourself: “Well gee, is there a point when you really want at make a cowardly decision?” No, of course not. I would love it if I were the most awesome courageous person in the world. Nonetheless, life isn’t that simple. A lot of my worst decisions led to my best realizations. Why would I want to force myself to make good decisions just because my purpose says I should? What’s so bad about making bad decisions anyways?! Shit, we’re human! 
Overall, I felt that this idea of a purpose was really bringing me down. There’s so much in this world I’d like to do and experience, I really don’t want to limit myself by defining one direction to move in. If that means I die alone and homeless, then so be it. At least I would have experienced being alone and homeless :-). If you have found your purpose, then great! If you are like me, and thinking about defining a purpose just makes you feel depressed, then at the very least - you’re not alone :-). Both my friend, and myself felt the same way. If it doesn’t feel good, then don’t force it.
May 4th, 2007 at 10:15 am
I was just like you and your friend a while back. I was depressed about it and I felt obligated to define a purpose for myself, or I wasn’t human or something. “Everyone has a purpose!”… I fell into a deep depression because I felt my life was meaningless. Luckily I came out of it, decided the whole notion was silly, and that’s about when I visited Psipog a while back :-). Great post!
May 4th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Nice post! I was the same as well, feeling depressed and such. I zoomed out of it after I noticed that not everyone really needs a purpose to continue their lives. A friend of mine told me that she just lives. so I’m on that track now ^_^
May 4th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
hmm… sounds like alot of soul searching, im really happy you guys are wise enough to pull yourself out before you got too deep in depression,
and cudos to the “personal development” catagory!
May 4th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
I had the same problem as you did. In the end I turned to the “lore of old” and decided on something I read in Greek liturature. My only purpose is life is to do something great so as to leave my name for ages to come. That and to learn about what ever interests me the most!
May 4th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I agree with Sean to some extent. Personal experience and enjoyment is a good portion of purpose. For me though, being a Christian that is not my entire purpose, there is also emphasis on the well being and more importantly, their soul. For me though the thing I enjoy the most in life (besides my girlfriend =D) is music. I’m a percussionist and I love listening, playing, and writing/composing music. So that is the life that I’m going to pursue, I’m 15 and am taking a music major next year in school.
May 5th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Less blogging, more coding, noob! I wanna see this site done by the end of the month!
May 5th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Uh uh, that’s a bad idea. Keep up the daily blogs, the site can wait a little bit. Or pull overtime and either get it done fast or die trying
May 7th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m reading this. You are exactly, EXACTLY, describing what I’m going trough now and have been going trough the past years. I quote this, I could’ve written it myself, it is exactly what I experience: “For me, it wasn’t useful at all. All it did was make me feel forced to move in one direction, when what I really felt was that I wanted to move in all directions at once.”
The point I am at now is what your friend says, just relax and don’t think about it, (try to) enjoy life. Altough this varies with me from time to time, sometimes even from hour to hour, I hope I will stabilize in that direction, although I still have a feeling inside I NEED a purpose. I will try for myself the experience reality thing, see how it works out
This is really a great blog, keep it up! Also in your previous blog you write a lot of things I can relate to and find in my head every day. I think we have in some sense a very similar way of thinking, a similar way of using consciousness. Would it be a coincidence I program too :p?
May 18th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Ah man, I’m glad I came accross this site ^_^. A while ago someone I used to talk to from Psipog gave me the link to here. I favorited it and eventually forgot about it since it was empty at the time. I was looking for something through my favorites yesterday, I thought that this might be it. It wasn’t, but it was along the same lines of what I was looking for ^_^. I’ve read most of the articles already. I doubt many people will recognize me from Psipog though, I wasn’t really active in the posting on Psipog. On to the article.
I suppose this is what I’m going through right now. It made me really sad to go through and feel like there is no point to absolutely anything in the long run. I completely lost my purpose once I realized there isn’t a full purpose to have a purpose other than for it to be for yourself. But after going through a bunch of things, I realized that it really wasn’t worth going through life the way I was. So, just gotta live to live, like a few others are saying. I still can’t seem to grasp what I’m trying to do though, I mean I understand, its just that my feelings aren’t consistent with it, I get really unmotivated to do things, while others its really easy. It takes time I suppose…
June 2nd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
quote from NeoPsychic:
to leave my name for ages to come
Lol. Now that you posted here, I believe you’ve left your mark :P.
To Sircubes:
Hey, me too. I was looking through my emails and noticed an email from alittleweird from a while ago and decided to check this place out.
BTW, Sean, if you need help with programming, I can help you with html, javascript, and php. Happy coding!
June 9th, 2007 at 8:03 pm
Lol. This blog reminds me a lot of myself. I’ve had the same problem too!! What I’ve rationalized is there are many things I can do and may ways for me to bring positivity in the world, so I’ve decided to just stay as conscious and present as I can with everything I do. I figured that may help people through example rather than just instruction.
Maybe it’s the same case for you. I don’t know I’m not you but I guess it’s something to think about.
Nice post!