If You Haven’t Found Your Purpose: How to Feel Good Anyway

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“The person who lives life fully, glowing with life’s energy, is the person who lives a successful life.” ~Daisaku Ikeda

We’ve all heard the phrase “find your life purpose.” It gets thrown around so much nowadays. Many of us have been in what feels like an eternal quest to find it, especially if we’ve been feeling stuck, lost, and out of alignment. Finding our purpose then becomes an almost obsessive search for the solution that will solve all our problems.

We’ve been led to believe that a life purpose is a single thing, a calling that we’ll be passionate about…

(image)

“The person who lives life fully, glowing with life’s energy, is the person who lives a successful life.” ~Daisaku Ikeda

We’ve all heard the phrase “find your life purpose.” It gets thrown around so much nowadays. Many of us have been in what feels like an eternal quest to find it, especially if we’ve been feeling stuck, lost, and out of alignment. Finding our purpose then becomes an almost obsessive search for the solution that will solve all our problems.

We’ve been led to believe that a life purpose is a single thing, a calling that we’ll be passionate about, and that we’ll know deep inside that we’ve found it. With it, we’ll feel accomplished and fulfilled and, instead of feeling stuck, we’ll have our answer as to what we’ll do day in and day out, giving meaning to why we’ve been put on this planet Earth.

On the flip side, we believe that without one, we’ll live an uninspired, lackluster life. Without one, we’ll feel out of alignment and be forever stuck.

But what if I told you that’s not true? That what you think you know about finding your life purpose is, in fact, the thing that’s keeping you stuck, and that you can stop searching for your life purpose and still be fulfilled?

I know this may sound like a big claim. But after close to two decades of trying to find my own life purpose, I’ve finally learned that a life purpose is not an actual destination and much less the final step. It’s more about a general feeling than a tangible single thing we do. Let me explain.

I used to be the poster child for doing everything right and by the book. You gave me directions, I followed. I did what I was told to do, no questions asked. I studied what I thought was a sensible career choice and would be expected from a straight-A student that loved math (bachelor’s and master’s in economics, thank you very much).

My interest in finding my purpose first started during what I thought was my last semester at university. As I thought was expected from a math nerd like me, I was doing the honors stream in economics and needed the approval of the head of the department to graduate. Turns out that, even though I had chosen an elective as per the instructions in the program rule book, the head felt my choice was too “easy” compared to what my peers had chosen and, as such, could not let me graduate from the honors program.

I had to either graduate from the regular economics stream or stay an extra semester to do a more “difficult” course. (Spoiler alert: I did the extra course and did my master’s too, even though I knew deep down that was not what I really wanted to do. I did it because that’s what I thought I should do.)

Now, you may think (and I don’t blame you here—these are my thoughts too now in hindsight), what was the big deal about that? Just finish school and get on with life!

But for me, at that moment, my world came crashing down. It was then that I realized for the first time how I was defining my worth based on what I did and what others thought of me instead of from within. And that single event catapulted me to a journey of self-help and self-discovery that has now spanned twenty years.

The quest to find my life purpose thus began.

After graduation, I was feeling so lost that I became obsessed with finding my purpose, sure that once I’d found it, I’d stop feeling so stuck and uninspired, with life just passing me by. I yearned for my life to have meaning and was determined to find my purpose to get that.

For the next few years, I read books about how to find your purpose. I listened to podcasts and talks and even attended workshops. I was convinced that I’d eventually stumble on that thing that I was so passionate about and naturally good at that I could dedicate my life to doing it.

I asked myself what I liked to do and made lists. I asked others what they thought I was naturally good at. I took personality tests. Had my natal chart read. I even looked back to what I enjoyed doing as a kid in hope of finding my nugget of gold.

I tried it all, going down my list like at a grocery store: baking, creative writing, dancing, etc. The trouble was, regardless of what I did, as time advanced, I still felt lost and misaligned. In the meantime, I had to pay my student loans, so finding my purpose took the backseat as I worked in perfectly good jobs that paid the bills.

Fast-forward more than a decade later, and I was keenly aware that I had spent the last fifteen years working in corporate, feeling lost and stuck in a career I did not want, in jobs that didn’t fulfill