Purpose in life emerges from our deepest values and manifests through meaningful action in the world. Purpose is an essential aspect of flourishing, providing a sense of having a calling, a participation in something beyond our self. When we flourish we are embracing being our better selves. Purpose is an expression of being in alignment with that better self and is near the apex of self-actualization.
In our postmodern world, many traditional truths may no longer provide the support for developing purpose. This lack of established truth need not eliminate the creation of purpose for ourselves. When we explore and develop our own values, we can then infuse our actions in life with a sense of personal purpose.
Topics in the document below:
Creating purpose
Purpose and a sense of self
Purpose is meaningful motivation
Creating purpose
Flourishing includes having a personally-endorsed purpose in life. Having a purpose is an essential aspect of being human and includes feeling that our actions in the world matter and that we can attain something we value. Purpose in life has often been associated with the rigidly defined values of our culture, often through moral or religious precepts. As these fixed paths in life have worn away, we may come to associate purpose as a legacy of those limiting, self-refuting, socio-religious mores and beliefs. Even though the old definitions of value may no longer work for some of us, our need for purpose is still part of our nature.
The great humanistic advance was to free individuals from rigid adherence to externally mandated dictates. The humanistic project served to free humankind from the rigid inauthentic roles of the life-not-lived and held out the promise that each individual has a uniquely valuable connection to life with a potential for meaningful engagement. It has been problematic for most people to find an autonomy that facilitates an authentic engagement with the world. For many individuals the autonomy of being freed from the shackles of a rigid pre-cast identity has left a vacuous sense of alienation from oneself and life in general.
The humanistic writer Erich Fromm accurately asserted that freeing oneself from rigid inauthenticity was more prevalent than the development of the subsequently needed self-actualization. Fromm wrote extensively about freedom and made an important distinction between a freedom from something as opposed to having a freedom for something. A freedom-for something was a development Fromm felt was infrequently attained, contributing to the general sense of alienation and aloneness in the world and a disconnection from life.
Charles Taylor writes that this shift away from historically relevant moorings of things to believe in has contributed to an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and purposelessness in modern man. He sees a strong tie between Culture and the Self asserting, “Culture is what replaces religion, and must do so if the decline of belief is not to have impoverishing consequences.” Taylor’s view is that the nature of the culture will determine the moral landscape. Religiosity was the culture of prior centuries, but the enlightenment and modernity shifted culture away from traditional religiosity. Although, religion continues to create the moral culture of contemporary religious communities, those individuals that are not adherents to a religious doctrine increasingly look to contemporary culture to reveal what should be valued.
Be it the aloneness described by Erich Fromm or meaninglessness elucidated by Charles Taylor, the situation is such that — freedom from perceived moral restraints without a reconnection to purposeful action in the world has left many people grossly discontent.
The polarization in the current cultural landscape obstructs the development of the type of purpose that leads to Wisdom. The lack of discourse between conflicting contemporary cultural values often results in moral nihilism, extreme materialism, or an endless competition for determining the greater good. Those competing values include identity politics and assertion of rights by agenda-focused groups: neoliberalism, religious-extremism, anti-capitalism, etc. These powerful identity-defining causes must be reconciled in order to avoid increased cultural polarization. Unfortunately, the contemporary culture does not readily support a reconciliation between these competing values. When our purpose is embedded in a sense of us-versus-them, it limits the development of perspective an essential element of Wisdom.
Purpose and a sense of self
We can inculcate purpose by understanding who we are and why we do what we do. By deliberating on our values and beliefs, we can develop a capacity for self-calibration to assess how our actions in the world line up with those deeper values. Reflecting on both our actions and our values, we can determine the degree of authentic coherence between our actions and values. We can then begin to accept ourselves as we are in the present, and either reinforce and develop that or change and aim for what we wish to become.
There is always a motivation tied to our actions and failure to explore it limits our ability to connect to a sense of purpose. Knowing who we are comes from understanding what is of crucial importance to us and this is often revealed to us in actions. When we view our actions in the world from the perspective of our deeper values, we can gain clarity about what our purpose is and what we should be doing in the world. Through joining our values and our actions, we develop our sense of purpose and come to recognize that the choices we make now mold what we are becoming.
Purpose provides a sense of self-definition, a self-definition of becoming and growing. Purpose and identity are not static defining conditions, but are a process of unfolding towards total self-actualization. Self-actualization includes active support of the continually unfolding connection between identity and purpose.
Developing purpose is not an intellectual pursuit, it is a lived experience. We must become a witness to the purpose we are presently living and with that new capacity we can shape, magnify, or direct our purpose. When we see our current strivings as a reflection of our purpose, we begin to look beyond our needs of the moment. This shift from looking at our current needs and actions as situationally limited, helps us own that what we are doing is who we are and will shape who we become in the future. For example, Richard Dryfus in the film, Mr. Holland’s Opus, felt his life had no purpose. Throughout his years as a music teacher, he never recognized the purpose imbedded in his duties. He did not know that his day-to-day life as a music teacher was tied to his purpose. Only upon his retirement send-off, when his many students shared how he had benefited their lives, did he experience the purpose he had been living all along.
Purpose is a perspectival reality that we must cultivate the capacity to experience. Everything we do has purpose. We must self-reflect and accept this in order to experience purpose. We can then embrace that purpose or have the courage to refute it and change.
Purpose is meaningful motivation
Purpose is a type of motivation, one fueled by our deepest values and beliefs. Motivation combines our intellect with our desires and when we experience purpose, our motivation includes the added quality of importance or meaningfulness. Being engaged in meaningful action in the world is essential to flourishing. Fortunately, we have an innate mechanism in our emotional motivational system that can channel our beliefs and values into a sense of purpose.
As Human beings we must have a purpose, motivating us into the future. Without a purpose our lives have no focus and as general folk wisdom reflects, we lose our will to live. We give up. Experiencing purpose is fundamental to being fully human and it is in our nature to act with purpose in the world. When we recognize that our actions stem from our values, we are supporting this natural capacity for experiencing purpose.
Understanding how our values and needs shape our sense of purpose can help us adapt to changing life circumstances and maintain a lifelong connection to purpose. In the film, The Shawshank Redemption, three convicts have a purpose, to escape from a dehumanizing incarceration in prison. They attain their purpose and all three escape. Within a couple of days one escapee has allowed himself to be recaptured, one has suicided by hanging, and the third is seen making it to his dream world, a quiet life in Mexico. Purpose is a powerful motivator, but it must also be flexible, to adapt to new needs, values, and circumstance. Often the loss of a powerful, but rigidified purpose, can be annihilating.
When we recognize that part of our Humanness is needing a purpose, we can develop a supra-ordinate purpose. Respect for our need to have a purpose and to be continually striving into our future can be a life-long sustaining purpose. With such a construct, we are always able to seek to attain being more, and we are respectful of our changing purposes as well as the purposes of others. This perspective allows us to grow and change, to evolve new purposes without needing to devalue our prior purposes. We can come to value our human need for purpose as a life force, continually compelling us toward a future.
Purpose is an aspect of transcendence, because through purpose we experience an ineffable pull toward something beyond the self, the ego, and our limited context. Purpose is embracing being pulled toward something, a calling, a commitment arising from a sense of meaning or faith. This pull toward something is fueled, not out of fear or scarcity, but from an infinite source, by abundance.