What does 'life purpose' mean to you?

Welcome to the ArtsBound Newsletter. Every Tuesday, I share three thoughts or insights meant to help performing arts students and young professionals flourish in their life and career. Today, in response to a video posted by author Mark Manson, we’re looking at how playfulness and journeying are probably at the core of our ‘life’s purpose’. We’ll address: 1) why life purpose seems to be a pressing issue for so many people; 2) whether determining your life’s purpose is a first-world problem; and 3) how determining your life’s purpose is and is not a perennial issue.

- 7-minute read -

 (NOTE: I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.)

First, a bit of context…

Author/thinker, Mark Manson, achieved renown when his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck became a #1 New York Times Bestseller. I’ve enjoyed Manson’s writing for a few years now (the content and spirit of it, that is… and I’ve grown to understand the swearing and sarcasm). I read his weekly newsletter, and last week he promoted this YouTube video about life purpose (FAIR WARNING: Because I’m citing Manson’s video, I feel obligated to link it, but you should be prepared for crude content if you choose to watch it). 

Since the work I do with performing artists deals largely with the related topic of calling, I clicked.

There’s a great deal in his video that resonated with my thinking on the matter, and I’ll be sure to cover that here. But there are three points he made that I want to push back on and/or unpack a bit more.

Here they are. 

1. Why does ‘finding your life purpose’ seem to be on the minds of so many people?

There is high supply and high demand these days when it comes to services and content geared towards helping people discover their life purpose. In Manson’s video, he actually expresses dislike of the term ‘life purpose’, saying it sounds like there is a “Universal purpose each one of us is born for, and we need to go on a cosmic journey to find it”; to him, the idea seems too “theological” and “self-important”.

He posits that, when people are asking about their life’s purpose, what they really mean is, “How can I spend my time in a way that feels important?”. 

(So much for avoiding self-importance.)

I agree here that the term ‘life purpose’ can be misleading, but perhaps for different reasons (I prefer the term calling; I’ll discuss that later).

To answer the question he poses - How can I spend my time in a way that feels important? - he proposes finding the intersection between three important things:

• Something you enjoy doing.

• Something you’re good at.

• Something that other people value.

Manson suggests that people have a hard time answering these questions as a result of habitual people-pleasing and over-dependence on others. I like this model a lot, and I agree about the dependency part. But I believe Manson actually dismisses the key to unlocking this problem at a deeper level: 

It’s the ‘cosmic journey’ he unfortunately mocks.

When referring to people who are self-important or over-dependent on others, Manson is really describing people who have been uninitiated.

In ancient and indigenous civilizations, initiation is the rite of passage between childhood and adulthood - when young members of the tribe assume roles that provide for the economy of the community. The initiation process usually involves a ritual evocative of the archetypal Hero’s Journey, and it is through this process that the individual matures, understanding their strengths and limitations thereby tempering dependency and self-importance.

The Hero’s Journey has its imprint on the literature and mythology of nearly every culture on the planet, going as far back as we have records. 

It isn’t just new age mumbo-jumbo; it’s hard-wired into our existence. 

In our present-day society, we’ve pushed out many of the crucial elements present in ancient and indigenous civilizations. Empiricism has minimized the value of intuition. Young people lose a sense of autonomy and playfulness when they go to school, and the demands of modern schooling leave little room for an authentic Hero’s Journey. Initiation rites have been diluted or, in some cases, disappeared altogether. Instead, college freshmen drink themselves silly in a drastic attempt to find expression for the existential energy calling them to break away from society to be challenged and grow.

Present-day initiations can take on all different forms, but they are still crucial to our development. Initiated individuals are far more likely to have a clear idea of those three important things Manson suggests we find.

So yes, in a way, discovering your life’s purpose actually does require something of a cosmic journey.

The proverbial midlife crisis is Life calling us to embark on a journey we’ve yet to take. The phenomenon of the millennial generation’s quarter-life crisis is the result of the acceleration of institutional standardization and obsession over achievement (other people’s expectations) over the last three decades.

More than How can I spend my time in a way that feels important?, I think those who struggle with the ‘life purpose’ question are living with a sense that there is a fuller life they could be living, and that they have potential that’s yet to be actualized.

And they are probably right.

These are spiritual questions, and they can’t be resolved through empirical means. The good news is that, as long as you are still drawing breath, it’s not too late to undergo the journey to which you are being called. 

2. Is trying to determine your life’s purpose a ‘first-world problem’?

Manson backs-up his dislike for the ‘life purpose’ question with the assertion that the longing for clarity surrounding your life’s purpose is a privileged problem to have. In other words, those just struggling with basic physiological needs don’t have the freedom to ask such a question. 

So is this the case?

Yes. But in some ways you might not think of.

Mason cites Malsow’s Hierarchy of Needs to make this point. Unfortunately, he presents the model in the rigid fashion that Maslow pushed back against during his lifetime. It’s true that those on the fringe of biological survival are not likely to be contemplating life purpose. But it would be a dramatic over-simplification to characterize anyone living in poverty (e.g. a single mom with two kids to feed, who feels she can’t take a risk to pursue her professional aspirations) or those in ‘developing countries’ as being in this extreme state. The link above has a fantastic discussion of this issue as well as a graphic - alternative to the traditional pyramid - that is very helpful in understanding the flexibility Maslow intended for his model. 

Either way, we have to be careful here, because we humans have a tendency of projecting our paradigms onto others. Life purpose and self-actualization aren’t just first-world problems - they are first-world concepts.

In preparation for a trip to the Dominican Republic and Haiti many years ago, I read up a great deal on the cultures of these places. One of the characteristics that stuck out to me is that, in Haiti especially, people tend to take it easy and live day-by-day. 

Does this mean that they aren’t thinking about life purpose? Perhaps it does.

Does this mean they don’t have a sense of what we would call ‘life purpose’? Perhaps not, and in many ways, it doesn’t even matter. Because they live simpler lives, they have maintained a sense of playfulness towards life with which Western culture has lost touch. And from my experiences, people living in these places still work to improve their homes and their communities, and they still experience a sense of meaning in their lives.

So in short, contemplating your life's purpose can come down to an issue of privilege, but it is also a matter of our forgetting, as a culture, how to be present and playful in the moment.

All that said, perhaps Manson’s point in bringing up privilege is just to challenge a “woe is me” attitude about not knowing your life’s purpose. If that’s the case, I agree and would refer back to my discussion above about being uninitiated.

3. Is trying to determine your life’s purpose a perennial problem?

At the end of his video, Manson tells us that the ‘life purpose’ problem isn’t going away. We will experience it over and over, and as we do, he encourages us to ask the right questions in addressing it.

I appreciate all this, and for me, it’s where word choice becomes important again.

Discovering your life’s purpose sounds very singular, absolute, and final… like you do it once and you’re done. Manson and I agree here that this isn’t the case.

This is why I prefer the term calling. To acknowledge your calling is to become attuned to an ‘inner voice’ that continuously leads you in a given direction at a given time, and you have the choice whether or not to follow. The image here is one of fluidity and whimsy, and also of serendipity and deeper meaning.

Being more or less in tune with that inner voice is a matter of degree. You can think of it as a spectrum between living your life ‘on purpose’ or ‘off purpose’.

While the process of ‘answering the call’ may be perennial, if you are in tune with your calling, the angst associated with the life purpose question will not be. Being attuned in this way reminds me of vocational alignment as described by Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon in their book Good Work (their research was also put to action through The Good Project) - a concept that gels with Manson’s intersection of enjoyment, skill, and value quite nicely.

When you are living in this type of alignment - when your own values are congruent with those of your environment - there is a change of tone. You are not constantly struggling to identify and arrive at your life’s purpose, walking toward a spot on the horizon and correcting course over and over. Instead, you are in the flow of that purpose, and as it changes and shifts, so do you. You will certainly still experience times of trial and challenge, and you might be called to change your environment altogether. But overall, the experience is much more one of integration.

If you or someone you know is wrestling with these ideas, I encourage you to reach out. Just hit REPLY on this email, or use the contact form on my website.

See you next week!

Lee

PS - I started ArtsBound because I believe the world would be a better place with more people living their true calling. If you know a student or young professional who is searching for their niche in the performing arts world, consider forwarding this email to them. If this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive my newsletter every Tuesday. It's free, and I’ll never share or sell your data.