I Really Don’t Have a Life Purpose
Isn't life and aliveness enough?
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life, but I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive…so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive —Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth
I’ve attended workshops where the leader asked everyone to declare a purpose for their life, put it in writing, and share it with everyone in the room.
This was a popular exercise. People shared lofty and poetic sentiments: The purpose of my life is to love, serve, and remember…to create a world where everyone matters and no one is excluded…to love, learn, and leave a legacy. And so on.
I dreaded the life purpose exercise. I found it pointless. My means of coping was to write down something that would get me a pass from the leader — and then toss that piece of paper in the trash after the workshop.
The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves — Alan Watts
Many discussions of time management begin with life purpose. The rationale is that knowing your life purpose will help you generate specific goals, and that effective goals will align with your purpose.
This easily leads to inflated self-expectation. We set more goals than we can accomplish gracefully. We assume that our activity can expand exponentially.
Conventional time management favors a certain cognitive style, one that's linear and list-oriented. People with this style deconstruct goals into detailed action plans. They try to schedule the ideal number of hours for each activity, and to squeeze all that activity into our hard limit of 168 hours per week.
But quantity does not equal quality. Getting the numbers right is not the same as being fulfilled. Having perfect plans is no sure path to satisfaction. We can meet our goals and still feel miserable.
…the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible. The Martians realized that they asked the question Why live at all? at the height of some period of war and despair, when there was no answer. But once the civilization calmed, quieted, and wars ceased, the question became senseless in a new way. Life was no good and needed no arguments — Ray Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles
In the process of chasing goals we fall asleep to the richness of each moment. Our focus on quantity obscures our experience of quality — being fully alive in the present moment.
We set grand goals — to make more money, lose more weight, have more sex, to get enlightened, to feel fundamentally complete. And yet we forget to enter fully into the ordinary circumstances of our lives — the mundane, repeated tasks that actually take up the majority of our time. Unless we become peacefully intimate with taking out the trash, doing the laundry, and making meals, our desired sense of completeness will elude us.
We can only experience fulfillment now, in this moment. But in time management and goal setting we defer fulfillment until some imagined point in the future — a point that we never reach.
A philosophy student from Kyoto University once visited Zen master Yamada Mumon. The student asked, “What is the goal of life?” Yamada Rōshi replied straightaway, “To play” — Bret Davis
If people press me to declare a life purpose, I now reduce to it to one word — enjoyment. Why am I here on the planet? To enjoy myself. That’s all, really.
And it’s enough. Enjoyment — aliveness, awe, wonder, joy, flow, fun, play — is a high art and an act of contribution. I want to create a presence in the room that gives people permission to let down, relax, and simply enjoy our moment together. I can't imagine a better thing to do.
This is not about self-destructive hedonism. I’m not talking about having mindless sex and getting drunk every night. I’m talking about sustainable fun — long-term satisfaction that harms no one. This calls for staying healthy and being kind.
Casey Rosengren wrote about the tombstone exercise — writing an epitaph to be inscribed on your grave stone, a pithy statement that sums up your life.
I’d like mine to be: He modeled enjoyment.
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Of your list of sensations: aliveness, awe, wonder, joy, flow, fun & play, I think flow is the most under-rated. A flow-filled day and then a nice happy hour - perfect!