Robbed of Purpose

[This post is the seventh in a multi-part series called Everything You Thought You Knew About Meaning is Wrong. To be in touch about it, you can always reach me at [email protected] or visit me at https://ericmaisel.com/. Please enjoy the series!]

Let’s continue with our graduate student for another moment.

In fact, two crises occurred in her life. First is the one I’ve just described, that her hopes that her graduate program would provide her with experiences of meaning—would “feel meaningful”—were dashed. But a second crisis also occurred, which is why she is feeling so very low. That she has seen through her program, which was to lead to a certain career and a certain life, has robbed her not only of meaning but of purpose as well. And when those two things happen together, life grows immensely dark.

You can have a meaning crisis without a purpose crisis. Say, for example, that you are teaching at a certain school and things change—the curriculum changes, a new principal arrives, your work load increases, or maybe many negative things descend all at once—and teaching at that school no longer feels meaningful. That will likely be experienced as a meaning crisis. But your purpose hasn’t crashed. In this scenario, you still love teaching children—you just don’t want to be at this school. So, you look for a new job at another school and, with luck, you find one. Because the challenges at your last school soured you on that school but not on teaching, you didn’t find yourself falling off the precipice into that deeper double crisis of both a meaning collapse and a purpose collapse.

The best answer to a meaning crisis is to remind yourself that you have multiple life purposes—that many things are important to you—and that you therefore have many meaning opportunities available to you. You might well coax the experience of meaning into existence by turning to one or another of your several life purposes: you might spend a day in service, or a day as an activist, or a day with your children at the zoo, or a day on a hike, and so on. But if the meaning crisis you are experiencing feels as if it has robbed you of all purpose, as is the case with our graduate student—that suddenly nothing at all feels important—then it will feel impossible to use the idea of “life purpose” as a solution to your meaning crisis.

To put this another way, if you had a “bad meaning day” at work, you could still have a “good meaning day” at home. But if that “bad day” did more than just feel meaningless—if it actively stripped your life of the sense that life had any purpose whatsoever—then you will carry that horrible feeling home with you, making home no better a place than work. Because you are now carrying “a lack of purpose” around with you as if it were a heavy overcoat, you can’t help but sink very low, under the terrible weight of life having neither meaning nor purpose.

This calamity happens much more often than we realize. Even a small event can precipitate it. You’ve organized your life and identity around acting; you give a terrible audition; and meaning and purpose both crash, precipitating a dramatic reaction: you pack up your car, leave L.A., and never act again. Or it might be a medium-sized event: you’ve organized your life and identity around being a well-known physicist, a rival wins an award you coveted, and you plummet into a very dark place. Or it might be a large event: you’ve organized your life and identity around being in a relationship, your lover of many years has an affair, and both meaning and purpose leave the building.

Whether the precipitating event is small, medium, or large—or even just a passing thought, the idle thought that everything that a moment ago felt important to you no longer does—if this crisis happens, it is about as severe a crisis as a human being can experience. Some absence of meaning can be dealt with—but an absence of both meaning and purpose? That produces despair.

How can you reinvest life with the feeling of purpose when that feeling has evaporated? Is the answer the same as it is with meaning? With meaning, we can do several things: we can remind ourselves that meaning comes and goes and that its absence is no tragedy; we can repeat things that we’ve experienced as meaningful in the past, with the hope that they will feel meaningful still; we can try new things that we think might coax the feeling of meaning out of hiding; and so on. But will those same tactics work with purpose?

Can we operate “without purpose,” telling ourselves that “purpose is bound to return”? Can that possibly work as a tactic? You can see the dilemma here. Losing purpose is a much bigger deal than not experiencing meaning. Meaning is merely a feeling; but purpose amounts to our operating instructions. If we “lose the plot,” how can we live? Why brush our teeth? Why not have another candy bar? Why not be irritable, or lethargic, or indifferent, or cruel? Won’t anything we choose to do feel completely arbitrary, and won’t doing nothing make the most sense?

For the moment, let us leave the dilemma right there. We will return to it, as we must. We recognize that our graduate student is suffering from the double whammy of a meaning crisis and a purpose crisis and that her new regimen of chemicals, which may numb her into tolerating these depths, can’t possibly be the answer. We have better answers for her, and they are coming.

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