What is your purpose – the meaning of your life? Do you feel directionless or like something is missing? Do you find yourself mindlessly ‘going through the motions’ of your life without a sense of vision, meaning or passion for what you do? Then this post is for you.

In This Post:

• How to create a meaningful life
• How to “find” your life’s purpose
• How to stop feeling directionless and lost
• How to find purpose without hustling
• How to live a life you actually desire instead of just what you should desire

Purpose Isn’t Found – It’s Created

Purpose is NOT

• It’s not something that can be found or lost. 
• You won’t stumble upon purpose from a milestone like finding a career or getting married
• It isn’t something that chooses you like stay dog randomly trailing you home
• There isn’t a Gandalf waiting to invite you to your purpose on your 50th birthday

Purpose is created. 

More specifically, it’s created right now. 

Not tomorrow, not once you reach that milestone or that age – right now. 

There’s a purpose in making a meal for your loved ones. There’s a purpose in writing that stupid fanfiction that’s clogged your mind for years. There’s a purpose in dressing up just for the sake of feeling beautiful. 

Purpose isn’t found – it’s not a constant; It’s created everyday by you doing things you find meaningful.

How Do I Create Purpose?

The first thing I need you to do is to reframe what ‘purpose’ is. Many self-help gurus stress the importance of hustling, productivity, and efficiency – so do schools, most businesses, and many of the things you consume. Things are supposed to be fast, efficient, and, most importantly, convenient.

Tell me: Which one of thease are the most convenient option?

• Fast-Food or Grandma’s homecooked meals?
• Fast-Fasion or a sweater you knit for yourself?
• Practical, modern apartments or carefully crafted old Victorian buildings?
• Remakes and sequels to already popular franchises that took a year to produce, or the original works that took years to create?
• Listening to a violinist that’s played for all their life and loves their music, or an ai-made movie intro?

Now tell me – which choice feels meaningful?

Find Things Worth Wasting Time On

Consume content quickly, make money quickly, eat fast food, wear fast fashion and make fast cash. But what do we spend the time we win from convenience on? Doomscrolling content we don’t even enjoy? Spending time conforming to norms and expectations that we don’t agree with – to spend time with people we don’t like?

• Time will pass no matter what you spend it on.
• There is no inherent purpose or meaning to anything.
• You decide what’s meaningful: You decide the worth of an activity.
• Your purpose is to be happy.

Time will move on anyway – even if you spend it on things you enjoy, or things you don’t enjoy. There’s purpose in doing useless, wasteful things just for the sake of enjoyment. 

It’s made right here, in the smaller moments. There is purpose in creating beauty, in pleasure, in connection, in creativity. Fuck being productive. Fuck being rational. Fuck being efficient.

Try this: Every morning, ask yourself: What’s one “wasteful” thing I can do today just because I love it? Then do it—no guilt.

“What if I don’t have a passion?”

• You don’t need to know your passion. Just seek something that will make you feel 1% happier right now. And if you don’t know ‘happy’ – then seek the sensation of softness or relief as a guide instead.
• To discover your passion, you must try new things.
• It’s ok to not know your passion – no matter how old you are, or at what stage in your life you are.

Purposes Are Like Partners: You can have multiple in your lifetime, and they don’t have to be the same.

Just like with a romantic partner, you can have many deep passions, interests and hobbies.

• Some purposes are there for only a short while; summer flings.
• Some passions are life-long and seem inevitable; spouses and soulmates.
• Some are right in between. 
• Some are toxic exes – like jobs you hate but refuse to leave – that you should have cut off years ago but the comfort of them keeps dragging you back under the tradically low bar.

You don’t have to settle for one purpose, one identity or one passion. You can be many things at once: a boxer and a baker, a lawyer and an artist, a florist and a motorcycle person. Don’t limit your passions because it dosen’t fit the idea of what your type of person would do. 

If you want a clearer vision in your life, and to set goals that you actually want to achieve – read my post titled How to set goals you actually want to achieve.

Journal Prompts To Find Passions: 

• If you were invited to a ted talk – what could you spend hours talking about? 
• What activity do you not need to motivate yourself to do? Alternatively: What activity is hard for you to quit doing? 
• What do people tend to ask you for help with? 
• The Classic: If money didn’t exist, what would you do to contribute to society?

Feel free to share your answers with the community in the comments below, or join our newspaper!

There Isn’t a “Wrong” Path

There isn’t one right purpose out there for you. There are infinite possibilities, and there isn’t a right and wrong path for you to pursue. No God is sitting there, buzzing the WRONG button whenever you move in the “incorrect” direction. 

You have free will. You create your purpose through choice. It’s the beauty of it: What makes you happy IS your purpose. 

Be Inconvenienced. 

Our society values convenience – the bane of any creative’s existance. Remove the idea of productivity, effectiveness and shoulds and replace them with intentionality.

To create purpose will be inconvenient.

We spend the time we win on convenience with useless scrolling, pointless conversations, and unnecessary problems.

There is nothing more purposeful than wasting time on things that matter to you.

Allow me to Rehearse: Purpose isn’t found. It’s created.

And most of the time, it’s created through inconvenience.

You Feel Directionless Because You Don’t Spend Time On Things You Find Meaningful.

• Stop being Productive.
• Stop Achieving.
• Stop Finishing.
• Stop having.

It’s inconvenient to…

• Spend years perfecting a skill
• Change careers three times until you find a good fit
• Dress up when you don’t have to
• Start a buissness
• To put soul into what you do, instead of just rushing through it

But it’s worth it, just for the PURE PLEASURE of…

• The pleasure of striving – of wanting, of seeking, of desiring.
• The pleasure of doing – to be able to create, able to move, able to change.
• The pleasure of learning – to be curious, to wonder, to question.
• The pleasure of creating – to own something, to leave something behind, to be proud over something that you made.

Not just having.

There’s an imperfect, messy and soulful beauty in trying, striving. Only dead trees stop growing.

Because things like dressing up just for being home alone, drinking coffee slowly, reading useless books and baking instead of buying bread – it’s not effective. It’s not productive, it’s not convenient – IT’S INTENTIONAL.

Let Things Take Time.

Don’t let impatience hinder progress. Good things take time – but the thing is, time will pass anyway – and you have nothing better to waste time on than potential.

Slow down, breathe – you don’t have to be finished right now. You don’t have to be an expert right away. You aren’t too late, you aren’t too old.

• It takes time to build a creative skill.
• It takes time to finish a high-quality project.
• It takes time to walk instead of drive.

But what else will you waste time on but the things you love to do?

It’s a pleasure to waste time intentionally on the things that you enjoy.

That IS your purpose. Not the milestone – the enjoyment of the activity in and of itself.

And release the fear and shoulds of having to always be on top of things. 

Release the “Should” Mindset

Perhaps there are a lot of “shoulds” in your life.

Most likely, you grew up in circumstances that lead you to believe there are ways you should act, and ways you need to act, and things you have to do.

It’s a social construct: the expectation that you should do something despite you finding no purpose, pleasure or meaning from it.

If you’d like to know more about self concept, self-fullfilling prophecies and how to get to know yourself more – check out my blogpost titled How to discover your authentic self: Heal your self concept.

Journal Prompts: Question Your Shoulds

• Why “should” you? What is so bad about not doing it?
• Why do you have to?
• What are you so afraid will happen if you don’t?
• Is it really the end of the world if your fear came true?
• Is that thing you’re trying to maintain from crashing and burning actually something that brings you a sense of purpose? Is it actually worth keeping the things that you’re so desperate to maintain?
• Will it matter in 10 years? A week? A day?

You are the one locking yourself in a corner. You make the rules. What happened if you broke them once in a while? 

Do the things you shouldn’t do. Sit on the floor and eat, approach a stranger on the bus, draw an ugly portrait and send in an application for a job you’re not qualified for. 

Build a life of intention.

Avoid:

• Autopilot.
• Shoulds and have to’s
• Mindless productivity

Focus instead on:

• Free will.
• Wants and Needs
• Intentionally wasting time on things that you find meaningful
• Falling in love with striving, not just achieving

If you’d like to learn how to stop people pleasing – feel free to read my blogpost on How I Stopped People Pleasing (and how you could too) or check out my youtube video with the same title.

The ‘Fuck It’ Moment – Choose Your Pain

There will always be some argument convincing you that something is a shitty idea, and that it will be hard, that it will be uncomfortable and hat tpeople will be upset or judge you. 

• Every path comes with a sacrifice
• You won’t find a purpose that has no negative consequences
• Your job is to decide what pain is worth it…
• … And which pain is not worth it.

There is not a single choice you can make that wouldn’t inevitably bring discomfort and pain. I was stuck for so long, because I believed that if you find your purpose, it means you must give no sacrifices to pursue it.

If you’re waiting for a decision that will come with no consequences, you’ll likely wait for a very long time.

Be honest about the consequences of your actions – and genuinely consider what sacrifices are worth it, what values you’ll make decisions on.

It’s better to accept the sacrifices and consequences of your decision now – rather than give up the moment there’s resistance.

Choose Your Pain: Anya Example

• Anya wants to have her own business and be self-employed.
• She wants freedom and independence and to spend her life on her life’s passion.

If Anya Chooses to Create Her Own Buissness..

• Her work will be filled with meaning, passion and creativity. Her passion is her soulmate, her life’s work. And she gets to say she left something she’s proud over behind.
• But it will initially require a significant amount of time with minimal rewards.
• She may have to give up social obligations to focus on her work.
• She will face people who doubt her without any evidence to support that her actions will lead somewhere.
• If her business grows, she may have to postpone starting a family, and the social consequences of breaking norms could prove exhausting.

If she chooses not to create her own buissness…

• She may travel more in early life, saving more memories to tell her grandchildren.
• She cherishes the child that would have never been born if she had focused on her career.
• She did climb in her career, and she still makes a good amount of money.
• But she knows she could have done more with her creativity. That she sacrified the potential of her ideas. Her work is alright but mostly autotune. While other things give her meaning, her work dosen’t.
• She feels trapped – knowing she specialised in her career early and couldn’t make a career change without disrupting her entire family’s life, which she’s put so much time and energy into.
• She’s undestimulated at work – bored most of the time, and she’s exhausted by the end of the week.
• She dosen’t know her passions, it’s something she forgot down the line.

In the end, Anya will have to choose what she values the most, and what pain she’ll choose.

There is no right path. And there will never be a perfect option presented to you.

At the end of the day, every path is difficult.

The question isn’t ‘Will it be hard?’

The question is ‘Which hard is worth it?’

What Do You Want To Read Next?

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• Worldbuilding 101: How to Write Side-Characters
• How I quit people pleasing (and how you can, too)
• Fantasy Worldbuilding: How Does Power Work?