Purpose to me was something good to have, just like donating some money to a charity every year. You know, things we know are nice to do but have put off for later when we’ll have “time”.

Turns out purpose is actually more important than we think it is (a bad year is what most of us will need to understand that – was enough for me at least) and it has something to do with our brain.

I like brain stuff, the super complicated marvel of engineering that is literally behind everything we are and also the nuances that make certain brains behave certain ways.

Now, I am no expert but I’m given to understand that there is a part of our brains called the neocortex which is the most recent upgrade to our brains and is responsible for sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, language and most important for the purposes of our discussion, conscious thought.

Without it we might be more of the algorithm driven specialised shells for gene transmission that I believe other animals are.

With it however, we wilfully do stupid things that we know are likely to kill us like jumping out of planes, jumping off bridges and so on.

I don’t think such actions are evolutionarily sustainable so couldn’t have been thus programmed into our genes and hence they emerge from our ability to think independently of the amygdala and other parts of the “older” brain that would rather keep us safely on the ground.

This larger meaning and deciding for ourselves what we want our lives to stand for/be remembered for is what is referred to as an individual’s purpose.

Having purpose has many benefits, it is purpose that saves us from the clutches of apathy and moves us to do something about the things we care about.

It is purpose that has allowed us to create the great works of art, science and so on that we all admire. But I think the real benefit of having purpose is something much more fundamental.

If you think about it, mostly we are in the journey part of life i.e. working our ass off to become the billionaire/CEO/fitness model/chef because creating something requires effort/time. So it is natural that the time periods classified as “journeys” would be more, much more than the time periods classified as “destinations” (which would essentially be points in time).

And so, if someone is doing something for the destination and does not care about (bad) or hates (worse) the journey then that is a pretty bad deal to have. No matter how rewarding one’s destination might be, if the person has reached that destination hating every moment of the journey then that is a net negative position. We know how easily the mind gets bored of things we have achieved.

Doing something where you love the journey (i.e. the work you are putting in) equally as you love the destination is simply a better investment to make with your finite time.

Just like there are a many ways a puzzle can be in disorder but only one way for it to be ordered, our destinations too have a limited set (if not only one) of ways to reach them.

And just like there are many ways to mess up solving a puzzle, there are many ways to not end up at your decided destination. And the bigger the puzzle/farther the destination the more ways for something to go wrong.

If someone spent 20 years of their life grinding through cricket practice (and hating every moment of it) for the money in being a cricketer only to get hit by a truck on the day of the trial.

Not only is that bad luck but also bad decision making to focus solely on the destination knowing well that there are many ways for things to go wrong.

Life is so vast and complicated that there are many things that can go wrong (plus there is Murphy’s law) and you can never completely inoculate yourself from externalities.

And therefore betting all you have on a point in the future (the destination) without caring for the journey is a bad move.

Little children just want to have fun, they don’t waste time asking “Is there really any larger meaning to hitting that ball with this bat?”.

But as they grow into adults, one would expect them to embody the name of their species – “Homo sapiens”, Wise man. Unfortunately, most adults don’t do this.

Plus our society too is designed like an assembly line where a person moves on from one shop to the other when they pass the requisite quality tests (exams, interviews, performance reviews etc.) and thus does not get time actually think about what they want their life to stand for – they’re too busy one-upping the Joneses.

So I think that when people say “I do not have a purpose in life”, I think that means “Through my current efforts I have not been able to find any activity that I can call my purpose.”.

The key phrase there is “though my current efforts”.

Purpose, being the subjective, touchy-feely thing that it is, requires a lot of non linear thought, a lot of going around in circles, a lot of asking yourself different variations of the same question multiple times and hoping that all of this will result in your finding (and accepting) the thing that you will make your life’s work.

In the current day and age where “instant” has a lot of value and there are so many things to do and so little time to do them, time intensive pursuits such as finding one’s purpose are often relegated to some unmarked dates in the future that never seem to come.

But asking a deeper question – is it possible that some people will do not have purpose at all?

Is it possible to be purposeless by design?

For a long time I used to think that of myself too because nothing seemed to stick, there was no activity that came naturally to me, I just wanted to chill and read.

Everyone has different reasons for continuing with work they don’t like: money, fame, power, identity and so on.

But the thing to note about all of these is that they are end states, destinations. And as we saw earlier having a “destination mindset” is suboptimal.

That’s why unless you love your job for itself, your feelings about it will be highly volatile depending on the type of day you have.

A good day when your desire for money, fame, power are satisfied with a pay hike, widespread appreciation, role elevation respectively will make you love your job.

A bad day when you don’t get the hike you think you deserve, your efforts aren’t recognised or you’re passed for the promotion will make you want to put in your papers with a punch to your boss’s face.

To my mind, this is the type of work that allows one to detach themselves from the destination mindset and instead focus on the journey, which might be super hard by the way.

Focusing on the journey does not automatically mean that you’re having fun, it might be the opposite, but the fact that you fight through is because of the conviction that the journey you are undertaking is the right one, because of the surety that the work you are doing is your life’s purpose.

This is the holy grail of work. A job where the work itself is the reward, an incredible positively reinforced cycle that powers itself.

Work where you are so engrossed that you have no idea that 8, 10, 12 or more hours on the clock have already passed.

In such a job we do not need the crutch of high pay or high power to make it feel significant, it feels significant and meaningful enough from the work that one does.

Here, any additional benefit over the reward of doing good work such as money, appreciation, professional elevation etc. is just icing on the cake.

I have never been able to find such a role, nor have met a person who has such a role. But this description does provide me a benchmark to aspire towards, no matter how bad my current situation might be.

This would have made evolutionary sense where one did not know how the next day or week or month would turn out.

And therefore those who viewed their, say, food stores as not being enough and spent their days gathering more stood a greater chance of surviving compared to those who were content with what they had and then found themselves without food during a particularly cold winter.

However, that was then and the world we live and operate in today is not as constrained as the world 500 or 5000 or 50000 years ago, yet the natural inclination of operating from a constraint PoV remains in our minds as an artefact of a bygone time.

Not to say that it’s entirely bad for us, in moderation the constraint PoV can actually be good, for example it forces many to start savings accounts in banks for the proverbial rainy day.

However, when we let it run wild and intrude in all areas of our lives then it becomes a problem.

An example is when we think that unless we absolutely start earning a million dollars a month we’ll never have “enough”, it is this very artefact that has been pulling the strings without us realising it.

I’d imagine that someone working and saving for 10 years would slowly realise that their savings have risen to a point that they can in fact comfortably leave their job for some time. But they never do.

We never stop to ask ourselves: “What amount of money is enough for me to live comfortably every month?”.

And I don’t mean this in a subjective manner in how a millionaire’s requirement would be much higher that a homeless person’s.

I mean literally the amount of money which would be enough for a human being to live a comfortable life with nutritious food 3 times a day, a roof over their heads and basic conveniences.

I’m no economist but I think a figure somewhere in the vicinity of fifty thousand U.S. dollars as savings in one’s bank account should be enough for someone to realise that they have enough comfortably leave their job for 6 months to focus on building things that matter to them. But it never does.

Different people have different levels of responsibilities, and a big one is having dependents (kids, family etc.) which seriously limit your ability to leave your financially stable but otherwise miserable job.

Yes, that is true, there is nothing that I can say that can act as a formula to relieve you of your responsibility of feeding the mouths you have to feed.

But what I am pointing at is our bias to imagine that we will never have enough until we have our mugs plastered on the cover of Forbes magazine, we never give it an honest critical thought and instead just accept the feeling of scarcity that our subconscious feeds us.

No matter what, our minds always spell doom at the thought of leaving or getting fired from our jobs and only when we deliberately force ourselves to critically analyse the question: “But seriously, do I have enough?” are we able to realise that yes, for many of us, we do.

And that is a liberating feeling, that moment when you realise and accept truly that you do have enough, that your fears were unfounded, lifts the weight off your shoulder, allows you to breathe and open your eyes to see clearly that you too have the opportunity to follow your heart into the spheres that genuinely interest you, at least for a few months if not longer.

And that is a super critical piece for being able to find our purpose, unless we feel free and unencumbered to make an honest attempt at finding our purpose, our efforts would be less deliberate and less true to ourselves, we’d always want to take the safer route even though that might not be our true calling.

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Aviral Prakash