The lack of meaning in life is a soul-sickness whose full extent and import our age has not yet begun to comprehend. - C.G. Jung

Ask people to list the most important things in life, and you will typically get a relatively short list with things like God, country and family on top. But there is a condition that presupposes and subsumes all the rest: purpose. It is the most important consideration, because it is the container that holds everything else. Your purpose is literally the reason that you are here. By “here,” I mean alive on this planet (and others, once we get there) as a conscious and sentient being. It is not hyperbole to say that once you decide to live on purpose, your life will change.

What is the Meaning of This?

The most important choice you can make is to live your life with purpose.

I have spoken at length about how unlikely it is that you exist at all. Add to that the fact that not only do you exist, but you are conscious, and the likelihood of you reading or listening to this is basically zero.

Yet here you are. The miracle of your existence begs the question: “What should I do with this impossibly rare gift?”

Here is something you may not have realized: you get to choose your life’s meaning. Yep: no matter what your physical condition or socioeconomic status, you have the power to decide who and what and why you are. This is a huge part of why, in the Hardcore Happiness project, we say: “Create Your World.”

And there is something else you may not have thought about: Every day, with every action you take, you create your identity. You define who you are, to yourself and others.

Since you define yourself day-by-day, every day, you might as well do it on purpose: you’re already on the journey, so set the destination. This is one situation in which those who wander can very easily become lost.

No Choice

It is possible to not choose a life meaning, a purpose. That is the choice of no choice; a decision not to make a decision.

When people have no purpose to guide them, their goals (if they have any at all) are usually short-lived and shallow. They may mistake their myopic desires for purpose: get a nice car, or make lots of money, or have as many sexual partners as possible: buy stuff, have fun. Without an overall blueprint that speaks to a longer, more sustainable future, these folks typically vacillate between jobs, relationships, and goals of convenience.

With no direction for life, they will take whatever job pays a little bit more, spend time with whatever people are easiest to find and be around, and “live for the weekend.“ These people find no satisfaction in their trade and view the entire work week as a block of events to be avoided when possible. Then comes the weekend, and their life may revolve around a similarly shallow pursuit of dopamine hits—doom scrolling, TV bingeing, organized sports, video games. There is nothing inherently wrong with those pursuits, until they replace actually living your life. Come Sunday afternoon, they steel themselves against the depression of having to repeat the whole pattern again.

A lifetime can pass with unbelievable and frightening speed when this paradigm of no paradigms has been chosen. I have counseled many people in their 40s and 50s and beyond who are devastated to suddenly realize that they have been adrift on the sea of possibilities their life has presented.

This existential crisis of meaningless manifests when our purposeless person becomes envious of other people who are living with purpose, achieving the goals that are part of that purpose, and weathering life’s storms with their self-respect and well-being intact.

That envy leads to a sense of entitlement where they feel they “deserve“ to experience the same benefits; to reap the rewards of the purposeful delay of gratification enjoyed by their friends. As the years go by, entitlement births regret, and regret quickly crystallizes into bitterness, despair, and rage.

The tragic part of this tale is that nobody told them that living a life of purpose would bypass that particular brand of hell.

Chart the Course

You always have the inalienable choice to determine your own meaning, even if at first glance it seems predestined. 

For example: You may say that you are called to serve God as your highest purpose. But even if you feel called, you must choose to accept the calling. You may have children and (rightfully!) decide that taking care of them is your highest purpose. There are plenty of people who contribute to the biological genesis of offspring, but they have to choose to be a parent. 

To be clear, you will take many smaller, short-term steps on the path of a long-term life meaning. Imagine a priest, dedicated specifically to serving God within the context of a particular denomination. There are many facets of even that carefully prescribed calling: our cleric chooses—as part of purpose—to behave in accordance with specific teachings and beliefs. Those so called choose to spread their beliefs to other people. They choose to become intimately familiar with their chosen belief structure, to memorize large passages of their holy books, and so forth. Purpose encompasses many goals along the way, but you still have to envision the bigger picture.

Be Open to Change

Your choice of purpose will change over time. There are two reasons it is important to realize that your life meaning is not something that is set at birth and remains until death. 

First is the fact that it underscores that your purpose, the meaning for your life is, in fact, a choice. When you are very young, your purpose (probably not consciously articulated) is to learn how to be a functioning person. To learn what things are hot and should not be touched, how to dress yourself and eat autonomously and so forth. Later, your purpose may be to get good grades in school, and obey your parents and gain something useful from your education; maybe get involved with a peer group in school or your church or community.

In high school and college, your purpose is likely to learn how to navigate relationships with significant others and secondarily, to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to launch you into a career.

Immediately afterwards, many people have children and choose to become parents. Others will enter the workforce and some will go onto more specialized education because they have chosen to pursue a specific career that necessitates more school. Some embark on trade careers.

All of these possibilities are choices that are best made when taken in light of your overall purpose.

Second, it becomes very important to realize that your choice of purpose doesn’t end when the career is over or the children have successfully moved out of the house. The optimal solution to major life transitions is to realize that it is simply time to choose a new purpose. My belief is that is as long as we are conscious, we have an obligation to consciously determine and relentlessly pursue our purpose.

Points of Purpose

It requires considerable thought and insight to choose a meaning for your life. This most important decision is an intense and complex undertaking, and is best facilitated with the guidance and support of someone who has walked the path and has experience mentoring others. You will want to work with someone more than two steps ahead of you on the path.

A very well-known Internet personality recently published a book on parenting, for instance—when his own children were not yet 5 years old. Parenting has only barely begun at that point: work with someone who has lived the bigger picture.

There are a few general considerations that are true no matter what your individual circumstances may be:

1. Your choice of life meaning should be all-encompassing and doable: think big and long-term. Remember, a purpose is not the same thing as a goal. There may be several goals inside of your overarching purpose. It may be a goal, for instance, for you to publish a blog. But that blog is only part of your larger purpose to bring your wisdom and experience to the rest of the world. And obviously your choice of purpose—no matter how grand—still must fit within the bounds of your physical reality. (Or must it?)

2. Passion: there are a couple of reasons that you should be passionate about the purpose that you choose. First, the feeling of passion when you engage with or think about your purpose is an indicator that your chosen purpose suits your personality and disposition and the appropriate phase of your life. Second, unless you’re passionate about your chosen purpose, you won’t stick with it long enough to make the pursuit of it the backbone of your lifestyle.

3. Service: your chosen purpose has to—at least peripherally—benefit others. I believe this is the case both because we are all part of the same energy field and because phylogenetically and psychologically, we are all “pack” animals; we typically have a higher level of well-being in the company of others.

Beyond that, every person who strives to pursue purpose will be challenged along the way, sometimes severely. Unless your purpose serves something larger than yourself, it is easy to become discouraged when the going gets tough. You have to be able to look beyond your personal pain, suffering, and inconvenience to a higher ideal to weather the storms and stay focused on a worthy goal.

A larger, transpersonal sense of purpose also creates psychological resilience. When life inevitably tries to derail you with tragedy, your overall purpose allows you to focus on a goal above and beyond your sorrows and grief. It serves as both distraction and reminder that there is more to this than just you and your personal troubles.

Without a larger purpose, you may founder; sit and ruminate helplessly over your troubles. Such a loss of direction brings you no closer to resolution, forestalls any progress that you were making in your life, and ultimately results in stasis, inactivity, and despair.

Live On Purpose

It’s easy to get our daily existence mixed up with our purpose. The way to fix this is to bring the activities of our daily existence in alignment with our chosen purpose. Do the introspective work, ask for guidance from a respected mentor whom you trust, and then follow that path with integrity.

Start to live on purpose now, and Create Your World.

(Created in Midjourney, by the author.)

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- JWW