[Kirism is a contemporary philosophy of life that I’ve developed over the last several decades. It is psychological, philosophical, and existential and takes into account human nature, the human predicament, our contemporary understanding of the world, and our pressing individual and species-wide challenges. I hope that you’ll enjoy learning more about it. In the first four posts of the series, we looked at the idea of absurd rebellion. In these four posts, we look at the issue of individuality, an idea that matters to Kirists. This is the first of those four posts. To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced. To be in touch with me about Kirism, please drop me an email to [email protected].]
You might name your life purposes in a list sort of way: for example, “I want to create, be of service, be an activist in support of certain causes, cultivate strong, meaningful relationships, and live calmly and also passionately.”
What might your particular list look like? Maybe: to make use of your talents, to have some successes, to love and be loved, to feel alive and connected, to not fail yourself, to do the right thing, to stay healthy, and a few more. Something like that?
Your list might be shorter, longer, or completely different from the above. Yours might include concrete items, like “Spend five hours a day on my home business.” Or it might include beautiful, fanciful, lofty items like, “Save the world.”
How many life purposes do you require? Is there some ideal or magic number, like five or seven or nine? Can there be too many? Can there be too few? Probably “yes” is the answer to the last two: there likely can be too many and also too few!
For instance, will it work to have just a single life purpose? Fighting injustice or being of service are lovely life purpose choices. But would it work to hold one of those as the only thing you deem important? Can a life be organized that way?
Kirists come to doubt that organizing a life around just one life purpose, even one as profound as battling injustice or being of service, will quite work. In reality, we deem many things important, not just this one thing or that one thing.
A solid Kirist life seems to require something more like: “I will make use of my talents every single day in the service of truth-telling and my other important values, while getting satisfaction out of life through love and righteous work.”
You might also condense your several life purpose choices into a simple phrase, for instance “Do the next right thing.” Kirists discover that having both, both a menu of life purpose choices and a resonant life purpose statement, is an excellent idea.
Doing this work and living this way, the anxiety of seeking and not finding may end. The despair of living without purpose may end. Panic around meaninglessness may end. Your battle to feel motivated may resolve itself.
We identify our life purposes, we commit to living them, we see this identifying and this committing as centerpiece activities of self-obligation, self-authorship, and absurd rebellion. We do this … and then all sorts of shifts occur.
Because our life purposes can and will shift. Maybe parenting is not important to us in our twenties and very important to us in our thirties. Maybe foreign travel is very important to us in our thirties and not important to us in our eighties.
Because of these shifts, we can come to the wrong conclusion that we have only transitory desires, not anything like life purposes. But a change in particulars doesn’t mean that our life purpose choices weren’t real at the time we made them.
The compact car you owned was real. So was the minivan you needed when the kids came. The minivan didn’t make a lie out of the compact. You didn’t “not know your own mind.” Life changed and with it came new life purpose decisions.
You might try something, because it feels interesting and right. Maybe it’s a certain graduate program. Three weeks in, you sense that it is much less interesting and right than you hoped it would be. Of course, this is a dreadful experience.
But does that outcome imply that you hadn’t made a strong life purpose choice? No. It only means that you made an investment in something that appears not to be paying dividends. You bit into something and it came with a worm.
This is a dreadful experience. Plus, now you have another hard choice to make: to wait out developments and recommit to the program or to leave the program, even though that may make you look flighty, undependable, and self-indulgent.
Like everyone, Kirists hate this. They hate it that their life purpose choices may not pan out or pay off. They hate it that life can let them down. They hate it that life comes with such an opaque, distorting crystal ball. Who wouldn’t hate this?
But they also know not to bash themselves for the thoughtful choices that they make. If you step to the side before you make your choices, if you apply awareness to life, if you try your best to do the next right thing, why then bash yourself?
To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
