Purpose is a distraction

Keep purpose in perspective

There is a lot said about purpose. Motivational speakers worldwide talk about the importance of knowing your why. For an organisational or business this has a lot of merit, but the quest for knowing one’s personal ‘why’ becomes an almighty distraction the moment you start looking for it.

If you try, I can guarantee you won’t find it. Even when you think you’ve found it, what you have found is an idea. A thought. This thought may satisfy you immensely, motivate you intrinsically, and all manner of exciting things may happen as a result of it. Yet it’s still a thought.

Sam Harris puts it this way (Waking Up app ‘Moment’, 30 March 2024):

“Many people worry about life’s meaning, or perhaps they just pretend to worry about it when they’re not engaged in other things. I’ve long been convinced that a concern about the ultimate meaning or purpose of life is a psychological problem masquerading as a philosophical one. What could life mean? What does consciousness and its contents in this moment mean? What is its purpose? Whatever is, altogether, simply is. What meaning could there be? It seems to me that meaning and purpose are just a distracted persons imaginary friends. There is only reality, and we’re not separate from it. Isn’t that good enough?”

Your purpose is a thought you had, that you attached meaning to and can use to motivate yourself. Some practitioners of purpose would say purpose is discovered in hindsight, that by looking back at the events and circumstances of our lives we can determine what our purpose is (or was…) such that we can orient the rest of our lives in accordance with it.

Any projection is entirely made up, a forecasting of the future. Say a criminal had a reflective moment and took their past of crime to mean their purpose is to help others not go down the same path of immorality. They could just as easily, and validly, make it to mean their life of crime so far projects a future of crime – that crime is their purpose. Laws, religions and morals aside, who are we to argue otherwise?

So the idea that purpose justifies our past or orients us for the rest of our lives misses the point, not to mention can create untold anxiety that one must now align one’s behaviour with their purpose. The past is gone, the future (you envisage) may never arrive. The only time that actually matters is now. So if anything at all, your purpose is living in this moment – whatever that moment may contain.