A whopping 40% of my newsletter subscribers said they want to find their life purpose.
I understand the sentiment. I was there once, too. But we’re really barking up the wrong tree here. When you think you need life purpose, what you actually need is something else.
You’re a personified version of universal consciousness, whose nature is creative. Creating meaning and purpose is what we humans do.
There is no such thing called “purpose” that exists independent of your consciousness. We created “meaning & purpose” and we can make it whatever we want it to be.
When you “feel” your life doesn’t have purpose, the real problem is not that you need to find “A purpose”. What’s really happening is that your consciousness, this meaning-creating machine, is not creating as expected. You need to find out why and resolve that.
A lot of time when people say they don’t find anything interesting and life is directionless, it’s actually a sign of mild depression caused by chronic stress.
I wrote a thread on this recently.
But aside from that, what I find most helpful for putting your meaning-creating machine back to work is this:
Do things for their own sake.
When we were young, everything we did was for their own sake.
You put poop in your mouth, stuck your finger in the power outlet, chased a butterfly for 3 hours. For what purpose?
There was none. You just felt like doing it.
That’s the nature of consciousness. It wants to explore, expand, experience. When this meaning-creating machine is firing as expected, you naturally feel passion, curiosity, excitement. You don’t ever have a second thought about what’s the purpose of something you do.
But as we grow older, we are conditioned to do everything as a means to an end.
You attend school to get good grades. You get good grades to go to a good college. You go to a good college to get a good job…
When you become used to operating in that way, you have told your meaning-creating machine that you don’t need it anymore. Because you’ve got a plan and everything figured out.
The plan consists of societal norms, collective values, others’ expectations— basically what everyone else thinks who you should be and what you think everyone else thinks who you should be.
That plan has a limited mileage, as you later find out. At some point you’d need to rely on your own meaning-creating machine to guide you through life. But since you haven’t used it for so long, it atrophied.
What’s the solution? Start doing things for their own sake.
When you force yourself to stop feeding external goals and purposes to the activity you’re doing, you’re subconsciously asking your meaning-creating machine to get back to work.
When you insist there is no other purpose to the thing you’re doing except itself, your consciousness has to figure out what’s interesting about this thing. Before you know it, it starts looking for more things that it can interpret as “interesting”.
If you do this consistently, like going to the gym, you won’t ever need to go look for purpose, passion, or excitement. Your consciousness can’t help but finding a ton of those for you every minute and every day, just like when you were a kid.
It’s super easy, because your consciousness literally fabricates purpose, passion, excitement out of thin air. It does so effortlessly all day everyday, if you would allow it.
In Episode 118 of the School of Intuition, I talk about what causes the feeling of apathy and stuckness, especially for people who are energetically sensitive empaths. I also talk about practical steps you can take to increase the sense of wonder, excitement and purpose in your life.
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