“What’s your purpose?”
Doesn’t this question ever grate on you? Getting asked about it, thinking about it, being confronted by it?
Even when no one has the gall to ask you about “your purpose” directly, it’s hard to escape. It is one of those ubiquitous terms in our culture, along with its functional synonyms “passion”, “meaning”, “dream”, “calling”, etc.
And I don’t think I’m alone in finding it one of those concepts that becomes harder to stomach the more people wax grandiloquent about it.
It’s what I like to call an “overcooked vegetable” concept—a concept made indigestible by being reheated over and over again until all the nutritional content has been zapped out of it: “freedom”, “happiness”, “love”.
Naturally, if someone tries to feed you overcooked mush, your body isn't going to be too happy about it. Why don't we recognize that the same thing happens with ideas? That the problem is not to do with the raw concept of "purpose" but with the way purpose has been packaged, prepared and served up to us?
To be sick of hearing about purpose is akin to being sick of asparagus because your mom would always cook them to a point that they turn into mush.
Understandable—but try a different cook, first. Or better yet, learn to cook with the concept yourself.
Come up with your own relationship with the word that makes it feel real and meaningful.
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So what is the substance of “purpose”, then? Let’s just start by listening to the word itself.
Purpose. The etymology of the word comes from the same word for “to pose”—poser, to put or to place. Pur-pose is therefore a posing forth or a putting forth—looking at the road ahead and defining it by a certain intention.
This could be the road immediately in front of us—on a task we’re working deeply on, for example—or could be the road that stretches well ahead of us into the future.
Two words often used interchangeably with purpose, “calling” and “vocation”, provide interesting counterpoints. Both once had the connotation of a transcendental calling-towards, e.g. from a Christian God (“vocation” comes from the same root as “vocal”, and therefore also implies a calling). In this respect, the etymologies of these words suggest that we are called towards the work—and therefore to our futures—instead of putting that intention forth ourselves.
These terms, predictably, lost both their transcendental connotations with the decline of Christianity and the rise of secularism as the default societal worldview of the West. Both “vocation” and “calling” today take their cue from “purpose” and largely put the activity in the hands of the individual—we pose-forth our meaning and intention in this world. We no longer expect a call to bring us to our calling, our meaning. A calling is our single, willful choice.
A world where our purpose follows from our will is arguably far more free. We no longer live in a medieval world where whatever we were “called to” was our fate—where our callings were so often our callings just because our father had that job and where, of course, most women had one calling and one calling only. We now have the freedom to choose to do whatever we want to do, however we want to make a mark on the world—to pose-forth freely.
So why does this freedom so often feel… like the opposite of free?
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As simple and subtle as the distinction is between “purpose” and “calling” (in its earlier connotation), I think it speaks volumes.
Namely—purpose puts the burden on the individual to carve out their path.
Now granted, this burden is also a freedom, a choice—you are free to make your own decisions, to choose that path. You aren’t bound by what the familial/religious context around you demands.
But, I bet you can see the tension here. This kind of freedom has its own unfreedom baked into it. The greater our perceived freedom, the greater we’re to blame if we fail.
Modern Western society lacks any sense of a higher force, higher power, or meaning beyond our own individual efforts. As late capitalist moderns, we define ourselves as a pure meritocracy, which seems like a reasonable way to organize society—until we find ourselves falling on hard times and running into a bout of bad luck, and find that society is not all that forgiving of such whims of fate.
Many critiques of capitalism will focus on these more clear cut examples of poverty and struggle—not unreasonably so, given that hyper-capitalist countries like the United States have poverty rates several times higher than more social democratic ones.
Less well acknowledged is this: “failure” covers a heck of a lot more ground than financial immiseration in Western culture, perhaps especially in the country of my birth, the United States.
You can fail to have a meaningful career. You can fail to get into a meaningful relationship, to build a meaningful family life. You can fail to develop meaningful connections among friends and communities. You can fail to find meaningful hobbies and pursuits. You can fail to be happy, even in spite of having the rest.
You can succeed at some of these things, but still fail at others.
You can succeed at some of these things, and be structurally prevented from succeeding at others.
There’s a certain menu we’re all given—we “get to choose” and “we have freedom,” but the jobs we get are constrained by the whims of the market. The ways we meet romantic partners are constrained by ever-more-transactional online dating. The time we have for personal pursuits and hobbies are constrained by the demands of our jobs and the metastasis of digital distractions.
And even if you manage to get it all personally, you still have to face the fact that our icecaps are melting and our seas are rising and the world may be a much worse place for your kids and grandkids as a result. You’ll still fail at bringing them a bright future.
Since “purpose” is often sought first in work, let’s focus on one’s choices there. Suppose you decide to serve the law—use your mind analytically, help the wheels of justice turn, make impassioned cases to juries and judges to convince them of the merits of a case. Sounds good, right?
So, your first choice of entreé is to work for a nonprofit to prevent fossil fuel companies from dumping billions of gallons of contaminated waste water in the Amazon rainforest. There are few of these jobs, so you have to be the best to work for those making a real difference, and either way you probably won’t get paid enough money to afford your big city rent. Buying a house, raising a family? Might want to hold off on that for a while.
Your alternative choice is to make an order of magnitude more money in corporate law, where you’ll help that same giant fossil fuel corporation get its way. Go this route, and you’ll actually have enough money to live where you work, buy a house, afford to put your kids through college. And then some! Be the envy of your social circle!
I’m picking an especially loaded career path—my lawyer friends report some of the starkest sets of choices between meaningful pursuit and financial comfort. But these tradeoffs exist everywhere.
For those educated folks who have gotten far enough to not worry about falling through the financial cracks of capitalism, following the menu rarely leads to outright ruin. But there’s meaning and then there’s security and comfort, and so often this feels like a one or the other choice.
Which is why less than 1 in 5 adults report having a sense of purpose. This, in spite of the clear cognitive and well-being effects that a sense of purpose gives us:
Higher optimism
Lower loneliness
Reduced risk of depression
Reduced risk of mortality
Reduced risk of sleep problems
But how are we to prioritize purpose when housing prices are skyrocketing, when the price of putting a kid through college has outpaced inflation by 172% over the past 20 years?
I’ve personally made my choice in life to pursue purpose in my work, communities, friendships, and intellectual/creative pursuits, but I am, in my mid-30s, unmarried and without kids.
Do I sometimes feel like a failure for this? Yes.
And so, “purpose” grates on our nerves. It’s a reminder of what we’re too often denied, or a reminder of how unreasonably high the bar is set for us.
Too often, our response to this menu of dissatisfaction is not to question the world that we live in, the system that offers us jobs that are either meaningless, meagerly paid, or difficult to come by and requiring all our efforts and attention.
Too often, our response is instead to be cynical about the word “purpose”, seeing it as a cheap, cloying inspirational lie (which it often is, when our culture has its grip on it), to proclaim, “I work to live,” and to then spend hours watching TikTok videos.
We are offered a Hobson’s choice by society. After we’ve made our inevitable decision, we pretend as if that’s what we wanted all along.
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There’s another choice, though. That choice is refusing the menu we get handed. This isn’t the easy choice—it means we’re going to have to cook up our destiny ourselves.
And that will take time, that will require us to learn how to get there, learn how to question all those things that we took for granted before. To question things well beyond our work. Can’t leave your job any time soon, maybe ever? How much time do you spend watching TV and on social media? The greater you let your life be defined as a consumer, the less freedom you have to be a purposeful producer.
A refusal of the pre-printed menu will be easier for some than for others. For everyone it will take a long time. That’s ok. The idea that you need to decide your life’s path tomorrow is one of the immediate-gratification illusions of our current capitalist society. It’s your life’s path. Have patience.
It will take a long time. But the upshot at the other end of it is that we might learn to form a better, truly freer society, where we’re actually able to make the most important choice in our life—what we actually do with it.
More to come on that.
Yours always,
JG
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Thanks to Sarah Ramsey, Nick Drage, Jude Klinger, Amber Williams, Russell Smith, Yihui Chan, Kym Ellis, Caitlin Huston from Foster for their feedback on this post.
Thanks Sam :) I'm a big lover of etymology for that reason. Listening to the original meanings in words is one way of keeping our eyes on that longer view/eternity that you speak of, even while focusing on our past/origins instead of our future. One of our biggest tendencies/dangers today is to keep our eyes fixed only on our present moment (and its often money-focused, dopamine-driven myopia).
In this respect, your question really resonates with me. While agnostic myself, I feel we've lost much of immense importance with the increasing secularization of modern society—community, a common ground of meaning, a clearer source of purpose, a less claustrophobic relationship to time. What to do about that, I don't have any clear and ready answers, but it's a question that preoccupies me often and will definitely be part of my explorations on this publication.
Quite the well written piece, JG. 🙂 I appreciated your exploration of etymology. It really put the words in their proper contexts: outside of the productivity-driven and money-focused definitions society has assigned to them.
Coming at this from a Christian perspective myself, though, I do have to wonder: if we attempt to pursue a purpose to which we are not called and put forth our own ideas of what we are meant to do, how can we be sure that the purpose we follow has a larger purpose within the context of the world and, arguably, of eternity? Just something to think about.