Feeling Lost in Life? Purpose May Not Be the First Question
Purpose is a demanding word. It asks for a single answer to a life, which is more than most people can produce on request.
If you feel lost, looking for your purpose is likely to make it worse before it makes it better, because the search sets a standard almost nobody meets.
A more useful first question is narrower. What have you been doing lately that you would still do if nobody knew about it? Direction tends to be assembled backwards from a handful of things like that rather than announced in advance.
Feeling lost is usually a shortage of contact with what matters to you, not a shortage of meaning in the universe. Contact is repairable, and it is repairable in weeks rather than years.
Why the word purpose gets in the way
Purpose, as it is usually sold, is a single grand thing that explains everything you do. Very few people have that, including many of the people who appear to. What most people who seem settled actually have is a set of things they care about, a few they are good at and a way of living that keeps them in regular contact with both.
Held to the grand standard, you will conclude you have failed at something you were never going to find by searching. Held to the ordinary standard, you have somewhere to start this week.
There is also a timing point. Purpose is often described as the thing that comes first and produces the life. In practice it usually runs the other way. People do something, notice that it matters to them and only later put a word to it.
Lost usually means disconnected
Look at the times you have felt least lost. Most people find those periods had two features. There was something they were absorbed in and there were people it mattered to. Absorption and consequence, roughly.
Now look at the present. Often one of those two has gone quietly. The work stopped being interesting and nobody noticed. The friendships thinned out after a move or a break up. The thing you did outside work fell away during a difficult year and never came back.
That is a much more tractable problem than finding a purpose. It is a question of what to restore contact with.
Interest is evidence
People dismiss their own interests because they are not impressive. The thing you read about at eleven at night, the conversation you always end up in, the problem you will happily solve for other people for free. That is data about what you value, even when it does not look like a career.
It rarely translates directly. Somebody who is drawn to fixing broken systems does not necessarily need a different job. They may need a part of their life where something broken actually gets fixed.
Write down five things you have chosen to spend attention on in the last month, with nobody asking. Look for what they have in common rather than what they are.
Direction is built out of small commitments
The reliable route out of feeling lost is not insight. It is a small number of commitments with other people attached, kept for long enough to change what you know about yourself.
Attached to other people matters. Private intentions collapse quietly. A weekly thing somebody else expects you at survives a bad week, and it is the surviving that produces the information.
Give it a season rather than a fortnight. Most of what you learn about whether something is yours arrives after the novelty has gone.
What to do about the pressure to know
A good deal of the pain here is comparison. Other people appear to have decided. Some have. Many are further into a direction they did not choose deliberately, which is a different thing from clarity.
You are allowed to say you do not know yet. It is a more honest position than a borrowed answer and it leaves the door open for the real one.
A short exercise: the last time you were absorbed
Twenty minutes. Written down. Memory is more reliable than speculation here.
- 1Write three occasions when you lost track of time in a good way. Any age, any context, work or not.
- 2For each one, write what you were actually doing at the moment it happened. Not the job title. The activity.
- 3Underline anything that appears in more than one. That repetition is your material.
- 4Choose one commitment for the next three months that puts you back in contact with it, and tell one person about it.
If you finish and conclude that nothing needs to change and you are simply tired, that is a real finding. Rest is not the same as being lost.
Three ways this looks in practice
Composites, drawn from patterns rather than individuals.
The competent drift
Someone good at their work, promoted steadily and no longer in contact with the part they liked. The answer often lies inside the job rather than outside it, in getting back to the work they were promoted away from.
After the thing that ended
A relationship, a role or a period of caring ends and the structure goes with it. What is missing is usually not purpose but the daily consequence of being needed. Rebuilding that comes first.
The unlived interest
A long standing interest that has never been given a real hour in the week. Often the fear is that testing it would kill it. Occasionally it does. Far more often it turns into the one fixed point in the week that holds everything else up.
When to speak to somebody
Feeling lost and feeling nothing are not the same. If the flatness has lasted months, if you have withdrawn from people, if you cannot sleep or if you have thoughts of harming yourself, talk to your GP. In the UK you can call Samaritans free on 116 123 at any time of day or night.
Where the book comes in
The Alternative Is Unthinkable is written from meeting people rather than from a theory of how a life should go. A good deal of it is about what people have stopped allowing themselves to want and what happens when that is looked at directly.
It does not end with a plan. It ends with better questions, which is usually what feeling lost is short of.
Also here