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Do you remember, as a kid, what you wanted to be when you grow up? In your childhood, you might have thought you can be anything you want in the world, and there is nothing to stop you. One day, you might have wanted to be an astronaut, but deciding to become a toymaker the next day.
However, as time wears on, you start to comprehend, the world is vastly different from what you have imagined. In your adolescent year, when you think the world will be your oyster in a few years, as you step into adulthood, but as your bills and responsibilities keep piling up, you start to realize that your options and time both are running out.
You might never know what you were destined for, you are no longer equipped to set out to find your “greater perhaps”, what the millennials reverently call “a life purpose”. As the harsh reality propels you to look beyond your utopian mindset, the world looks merciless, unfair, and very limiting, and remains unbending to your wishes.
If you have ever gone through a phase in your life, thinking there is nothing without a purpose or feeling stuck in limbo without a direction in life, and a vague sense of nihilism draining every ounce of your willpower, you need to reset your thinking. Read on to know whether you need a purpose in life and how to live without getting blinded by that mindset.
What Is a Purpose?
In psychology, a purpose is the intention to achieve a goal, for both personal interest and the betterment of the world. To put it simply, a purpose is something that propels you to get up in the morning, to accomplish what you have planned for the day.
Destiny is often linked with purpose. A sense of satisfaction settles over you when you do something meaningful, and it feels like you were born to do just that, it was your calling in life.
However, most people don’t find that satisfaction with their life and work. But how do you find something when you don’t even know what you are looking for? And that’s when the frustration stems out, thinking they are less competent than others, just because you haven’t found your calling in life yet.
Humans Might Not Have an Ultimate Lifetime Purpose
We, humans, tend to glorify our existence by implementing our superior intelligence, and thinking that we have a greater purpose in life which is very different from other species. While in reality, we are all just made from stardust, like any other species and objects in the world. And when time runs out we all are going to end up turning into that stardust.
Compared to the universe, our existence is very negligible. If you compare Earth’s 4.5 billion years of existence to the duration of a day, the entire human civilization can be compressed within a few seconds. Thinking from that perspective, your life doesn’t have to be full of purpose or meaning, life itself is enough to be a purpose.
To put it in another perspective, humans are multifaceted complex creatures. You might have more than a single purpose that will suffice your lifetime. You are not a machine that will do only one job at one time because it is unequipped to do anything else.
You have many potential but compressing all that to find one true purpose in life is futile. Besides, trying to find that one true purpose in life, you might be overlooking other opportunities that can also give your life some meaning.
You Must Ditch the Tunnel Vision Trap
Have you ever noticed that life seems to bestow you with success when you are least expecting it? And when you doggedly try to achieve something, it just moves further away from you. When you make achieving a goal your life’s ultimate purpose, the reason for your existence, you start to develop tunnel vision. And once you do, it’s very hard to get out of it. Even if you manage to get out after understanding that there is more to life than that one true purpose, the frustration you will feel over the wasted opportunities will be overwhelming.
Finding a balance between trying to achieve something but not making it the ultimate goal of your life is quite hard. You have to learn to care for matters without caring too much. And practicing mindfulness is one way to achieve it.
Practicing Mindfulness
When you are driving and get abruptly cut off by someone, how do you react? To blow off the steam, you might spew out some expletive in the other driver’s direction. However, does that irritating feeling stay with you the whole day, does it affect your mood? And that’s when being mindful comes into the picture. Being mindful or learning how to distance yourself from the situation would have helped you to get on with a much better mood all day.
Mindfulness is creating a buffer between your surroundings, feeling, and mind. It is being aware of what’s going on in your head, but without losing the perception of reality. Mindfulness can help you to look beyond the horizon, you do not get blinded by your immediate situation, and you will be better equipped to cope with success, failure, and life in general.
Focus On Helping Others
From our childhood, it is drilled into our mind that we have to become “successful”, and in most cases that “success” often is the euphemism for how much money we have. And the new age buzz about “finding your life’s purpose” that has been so often quoted by motivational or lifestyle gurus doesn’t help with the case. The idolization of finding your calling becomes mostly rhetoric.
However, all that talk about success often makes us think only about ourselves, we tend to become more self-serving, and collective gain means little to us.
But fostering gratitude, altruism is the basis of having a meaningful life. When you are blinded by your needs, life becomes limiting to you. And when you have your needs fulfilled, you have little else to live for. Besides, focusing on others can reduce your burden, you will learn to put things in perspective, and help to grow empathy.
The Bottom Line
Trying to find the meaning of your life might seem like a crisis phase of life that you might think will go away once you gain more experience in life. But deep down, we all question our existence in one way or another, regardless of our age experience, or status. While you might want some sense about your life and what it means, there is absolutely no comprehensive way to do that. The route is different for everyone. And you might be thinking it is futile to even try. But sometimes, a journey becomes worthwhile just for the expedition itself, without the destination being something grand. You might not have some great purpose in life, but it is still worth living for life itself.
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This content is brought to you by Shawn Richard.
Photo: Shutterstock
