I’ve wondered a lot about my purpose over the years.
For most of my life, I turned towards religion or philosophy for answers. Each new perspective offered some guidance, but nothing felt right for more than a year or so. It wasn’t hard to convince myself of a new perspective, whether that was “God put me here for a reason, I just need to find it,” or “I create my own purpose.”
On the surface level, I thought this may be just a part of the human experience. Although I came to realize that the reason nothing stuck was that the views I explored on purpose relied on shaky assumptions.
A few years ago, I decided it was time to take the question of purpose more seriously. And I’ve since come to believe that the way western society thinks about purpose is one of the most dangerous flaws in modern thought.
By the end of this essay, I hope to convince you of an optimistic perspective that ended my search for purpose altogether.
The best starting point I could think of is sharing what I’ll call the Modern Purpose Matrix.
This matrix is my attempt to capture a brief overview of the most common perspective on purpose.
On one axis, it’s whether or not we have purpose.
On the other axis, it’s how we arrive at our purpose.
I tried to keep the below as accurate and succinct as possible. I know there’s a lot of grey area, so apologies for over simplifying.
The first category, and most pessimistic, is the view that there is no purpose and we can not create purpose.
We call this Nihilism.
We have no purpose AND We can not create purpose
| We all have purpose | Purpose is possible | We have no purpose | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our purpose is pre-defined, and out of our control. | — | — | — |
| Our purpose is pre-defined, but achieving that purpose depends on our choices. | — | — | — |
| We can create our own purpose. | — | — | — |
| We can live as if we have purpose. | — | — | |
| We can not create purpose | — | — | Nihilism |
The next, slightly more optimistic view, is that there is still no inherent purpose (like Nihilism), but that we can live as if we have purpose.
We call this Absurdism (popularized in the mid 1900s by Albert Camus).
We have no purpose BUT we can live as if we do