life lessons

The Pursuit and Pitfalls of the Purpose-Driven Life

Tea Time Philosophy

I’ve noticed lately that I’m channeling Princeton from Avenue Q – not only because I’ve maxed out my credit cards, I was two months behind in rent, and I’ve messed up my personal life, but primarily because I don’t know what to do with a BA (or even an MA) in English. And, more importantly, I still haven’t found my purpose. At least, not entirely.

To clear up any misconceptions, as if there are any, I’m an atheist, and I have been one since I was a teenager, and that can mean a fair few things to different people. But the one thing that remains universal is that religion carries the implication that everything is created or occurs for a reason, and being an atheist means that that is taken away – you stop believing in some grand master plan, and you no longer hand your life over to fate. This means that you live life as if it has no purpose – you simply are. Things simply happen because they do. There is no rhyme or reason to chaos. It gives greater meaning to life because our importance as individuals is no longer handed to us – we are charged with seeking it out instead, if we want our lives to be meaningful. Of course, one of the biggest difficulties of transitioning from a theistic life to an atheistic one (I was raised Catholic) is accepting that my life is no different or more special than anyone else’s, and for most people, that’s a really difficult thing to accept. I certainly had some issue with accepting that I would be doomed to a meaningless life if I didn’t determine my purpose, and I still feel that way now, because I’m 29 and I haven’t found it yet.

Most women determine the purpose of their life is to be married and have children, and that’s absolutely fine. That’s a worthwhile choice and a very worthy life, if it’s what you choose to be. It’s just not necessarily what I consider to be my own destiny. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be married (eventually) and I’d love to have children, but I don’t want being a wife and mother to be my only contribution to the world. It’s just that I know that those two things would not be enough to fulfill me (or at least I suspect they wouldn’t. I can’t pretend to know for certain, as I am neither a wife nor a mother).  But the problem is, I have no idea what my purpose is supposed to be, and that is the detriment of those who actively seek to create meaning for their lives. There are no roadsigns or maps to purpose. I can’t type into Google “what is my purpose” and come up with a response that makes sense to me. It quite frankly blows.

I have nothing but envy for those who are so certain of their place in the world, and those who are keenly unaffected by the prospect of a purpose-driven life. There are people who just sit back and let life unfold on its own, and that’s a personal choice that I simply can’t afford myself. I’m not the type to relinquish control of my fate to someone or something else. There are three things in life that I’ve never been able to tolerate: being told how to act, how to feel, or how to think. So you can imagine that I have serious control issues with every aspect of my life, including, and most importantly, what I want to do with it. Finding purpose has become my obsession, because it will dictate the entirety of my life. It will determine whether or not I find a career that is fulfilling and makes me happy. It will determine the richness of my life, and the number of regrets I would have when I shed this mortal coil. And ironically enough, I’m finding myself resenting the fact that people can’t tell me what my purpose is. They can make suggestions, but even if I were the type to be told what to do, the ultimate decision would be based on what I felt in my heart, what seems logical in my mind, and nothing else. This is why I’m so in awe of those who just seem to know what they want to do with their lives right off the get-go – either they know something that I don’t, or they’re battling with their own sense of purpose in ways that I simply don’t see.

Being in England and out of my comfort zone has helped me sort things out as far as what I want for myself, but not as much as I’d hoped it would. I’ve made progress in my ongoing quest for purpose, but I still haven’t any real idea on what it is. I know that I want to create, but I don’t know what. I know that I want to make people laugh. I know that I want to inform others in a way that encourages them to question the world and what they believe in. I know that I want to walk around the world, but I still want to have a home to come back to. And that’s great. But what does that translate to as far as purpose? What does this mean I need to do? What medium can I use to achieve that? This blog is a great start, I guess, but I wonder if it’s really enough. I grew up as a storyteller with a big mouth and a lot of opinions and no motivation to do much with it because I wasn’t sure how to utilize it. Maybe I’m hoping that figuring out my purpose will automatically endow me with the motivation to see it through to the end. Who knows?

It does not help that job-hunting has been sucking the ever-loving joy out of me lately, because I feel utterly inadequate for what the world has available as far as employment. Practicality is sometimes the antithesis of purpose, because what is the point of knowing what you want to do with your life if it doesn’t help you get rid of the thousands of dollars worth of student loans you’ve piled up? Where is the line between the two, and when is it safe to cross? Or am I doomed to have to choose one side over the other?

Reality blows. Amirite?

The Measure of Success

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As an unfortunate member of Generation Y, my biggest concern about life, and the choices that I’ve made, are where my choices will take me in the future. It goes without saying that my dreams and my income don’t particularly get along. My dream is to buy a beat up old Victorian house and fix it up, a dream that doesn’t exactly seem feasible with a teacher’s salary. In California, no less.
I have spent more than my fair share of time wondering if I’ve made the right decisions, from my choice of degree, to the paths I have walked with it. And in my musings, I’ve come to the understanding that we live in a world where salary is our only indicator of our success, and by extension, of our individual value.
  I read a comic recently, penned by the incomparable Bill Watterson, that sums up the issue more succinctly than I can. About how we as a society measure our success by the amount of money we earn, by the number of our possessions, and by the value of them. And frankly, it’s difficult to not be discouraged by that blaring misinterpretation of what success is. Generation Y suffers from an affliction I lovingly refer to as “Entitle-itis,” in that we have the expectation that we go to college, graduate, and waltz right into a lucrative career; and then we’re positively flabbergasted when we don’t. To add insult to injury, there are plenty of people in our age group for whom that expectation has been fulfilled – I, for example, have a friend not much older than me who pulls in 180k a year as a software development engineer. Another, who graduated from USC at the age of 17, is the youngest person in history to raise a million dollars in startup funding for her tech company, and is only gaining momentum. And then there’s me. I have a degree in English, the only job I’ve managed to land is teaching part time, and I can barely keep my head above water. It’s easy to determine which ones are considered successful, and which one isn’t.
But here’s an important distinction, often overlooked, which equalizes the three of us. And it took me a while to really understand what that was, once I learned to dissuade my definition of success with the one that is so commonly accepted.
I’m pretty happy with my life. I love my job. My coworkers are great, I have a lot of freedom in which to pursue my other passions, I’m actually using my degree and the skills I had developed while pursuing it. Are there times when I wish for more? Of course there are. But I’m blessed in many ways already. My family, my friends, my prospects are always there – they’ll never go away. I make more per hour than my mother did at my age, and my job offers me experience that can only ever help me. I still get caught up in all of my material wants from time to time, but the trick is learning to disassociate material gain with success. I may not have a house or be able to travel as much as I want to, but no one can really argue that I haven’t accomplished a certain amount of success.
So will I ever fulfill my dream of that fixer upper house? Maybe,  maybe not. I’d rather measure my success by the happiness that I’ve achieved, not the objects I’ve obtained. After all, as the great philosopher Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”