What Is My Life Purpose?
This is a question that has been pondered by philosophers, spiritual leaders, and everyday people alike.
Many believe that the purpose of life is to find happiness, while others believe it is to achieve wealth, power, or fame. So what is the purpose of our lives?
This question confounds many people, especially those who are more self-aware and given to reflections. This question becomes important to find an answer to, as otherwise, we tend to be listless, wondering if what we are doing currently is our life purpose. Such a situation may prevent us from focusing on what we have, making us anxious and worried about what we possibly could be missing, which could be our true purpose. While I cannot answer this question for others, my take on this is as below.
The purpose of my life is to be happy.
By defining my life purpose as an end goal inherent to myself and not as an achievement, I open up infinite possibilities for myself to be happy. When the purpose of my life is to be happy, I find many things that make me happy – from watching sunsets and sunrises to making gains in the stock market, achieving professional success, building intimate relationships, to spending time with my family, relatives and friends. And the list can go on and on. As long as doing these things make me happy, I am no longer constantly worried and anxious about whether I am missing my life purpose. I no longer feel caught in a situation which may not taking me towards my life purpose. I don’t feel that I should be rather doing something else. By defining and accepting that my life purpose is to be happy, I liberate myself.
However, what makes you happy could be very different from what makes me happy. This, I believe, is driven by our desire to achieve a sense of importance. I have articulated a framework on what may drive our need for achieving a sense of importance, that is depicted in the image attached. As the framework shows, we are not uni-dimensional, and many things can give us a sense of achievement.
What is essential is that you know the drivers for achieving a sense of importance. Once you know the drivers, achieving these will create happiness for you and provide a sense of purpose to your life.
However, to do that, you need to accept and internalise that the purpose of your life is to be happy.