[This post is part of a series called Choose Your Life Purposes. If the issues addressed in these posts interest you, please consider becoming an Existential Wellness Coach. To learn more about our Existential Wellness Coach Certificate Program, please visit here. To preorder Choose Your Life Purposes, please visit here.]

Let’s say that you were a robot rolling off the line, built by a robot master to serve that robot master. Well, then you would have a singular purpose. Your purpose would be to serve that master. Done. Nothing much more to say about your destiny.

If that robot master accidentally provided you with consciousness, which of course would be a huge mistake on his part, well, then you might balk, rebel, doubt, and so forth. But, having been built to serve, you would probably still serve, albeit now while “depressed.”

But all of that has nothing to do with you. Nothing whatsoever. There is no robot master who built you to some singular purpose. That is a shopworn idea, even if billions of people still believe it. Leave all thoughts of a robot master or a puppet master behind. This is a new day.

In whatever way that we have mysteriously arrived here—this species of ours, this world of ours, this universe of ours—we can finally entertain and accept a fundamental proposition, that we have been left to our own devices. And that is not a tragedy!

That is not a tragedy! That is what existentialists call freedom. It is not the freedom to sidestep life, as if we could sidestep wars, famines, and epidemics. It is not that sort of freedom. No one is free that way. But it is the freedom to decide what’s important to us—to each of us individually. That is our freedom.

You might think, even with anguish, “Well, if there is no singular purpose to life, then nothing can be important.” But how does a child’s laughter suddenly become nothing, just because there is no puppet master? How does adding value become nothing? How does loving? To turn them into nothing is a mistake—and one that is so easy to make!

Here, we will undo that mistake. Let us leave behind the notion that there is some singular, elusive, set-on-high purpose to life and settle into the brave, empowering, and altogether right idea that you get to decide what’s important to you. You get to choose your own life purposes.

How will you make those life purpose choices? How will you decide which are the activities and the states of being you deem most important to you? Well, first of all, they must be important to you! You arbitrate your life purposes.

Your culture may say, “Turn over your life to taking care of your aging parents, even if they were always mean to you.” You get to decide if you agree. Your government may say, “Fight in this all-important war.” You get to decide if you agree. You may; or you may not.

Whatever is maximized or minimized by others, validated or stigmatized by others, all of that is for you to step aside from, taking a vital step to the side, a crucial sidestep to awareness, where you get to ponder, consider, and decide. You get to do that!

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