Do We Find or Create Our Purpose in Life?

Productivity and purpose are often wrongly interchanged. While frequently correlated, if one is mistaken for the other, we could be putting ourselves on a fast track to bitterness and burnout, counting our remaining days of PTO or assessing the feasibility of calling out “sick”—again. 

Similarly, suppose we confuse contribution to society, even value-based contribution, as purpose. In that case, we may find ourselves overinflating our sense of importance and inheriting a self-ascribed moral superiority that ultimately leads to our Jean-Baptiste Clamence-esque Fall from grace. That begs the question: if productivity and meaningful, external contributions aren’t equated to purpose, then how can we determine our purpose in life? 

Amorphous and unsatisfactory as this answer is, it is my working definition, and it is the best one I have to offer: purpose is what brings meaning to our existence. 

Part of that meaning can be derived from what we do, of course, but if we limit ourselves to doing, we are living in a single stratum of our existence instead of plunging into the myriad, potentially infinite layers of experience. 

And while the variability of this definition may be entirely frustrating (particularly to those of us who prefer objective, measurable truths (which seldom, if ever, exist!), it is also what makes it replete with beauty and possibility.

Psychology’s search for the meaning of life

Psychologists and therapists have been refining the concept of purpose ad infinitum in an effort to find a recipe for healthy living, passing the chisel to the next person to amend, simplify, enhance, or delegitimize their theories.

Sigmund Freud tells us that understanding the impact that our primary caregivers have on our subsequent navigation of the world will catalyze healing. Carl Jung tells us that surfacing our unconscious and unveiling all aspects of the psyche will bring illuminating truths. Fritz Perls tells us that confronting our here-and-now thoughts and feelings will ensure that we are always showing up as our most authentic selves, which will alleviate our immediate suffering. 

While all of the aforementioned—albeit grossly simplified-–lenses on understanding the mind and drivers of psychopathology are legitimate conceptual frameworks, they don’t explicitly address or exclude approaches to uncovering our unique definitions of purpose. 

Yet, that doesn’t preclude them from being the window through which we can peer to visualize and subsequently dissect the various artifacts of our psyche and the contexts in which they live, which is a necessary step in our journey to find our purpose in life.

Making sense of our story

Before we can attempt to ascend to our most coveted mental state, it’s essential that we understand who we presently are and what transpired to make that the case. In other words, we analyze our lives with a goal of understanding who and what influenced what we presently value and why. In the counseling field, this is often referred to as meaning-making. 

A la Heideggerian hermeneutics, we can extend the practice of interpretation, often limited to written text or tangible experience, into our own existence; that is, seeking to understand or interpret ourselves within our own respective contexts. 

A useful starting place is reflecting on the values you were raised in or tacitly encouraged to adopt:

• Were those values given to you as absolutes, or were you empowered to develop your own perspectives?
• Did these values arise out of generational fidelity to a certain ethos, or were your caregivers the first to pivot away from familial tradition? 
• Do these values carry any historical or societal significance, or were they selectively generated and refined through a more conscious and individualized process? 
• Do you find yourself lawfully abiding by what your environment tells you is correct, or do you find yourself constructing a life that reflects a value system that organically resonates with you? 

Once we have a stronger grasp on how we have developed our current value system, we can begin to assess whether that value system still resonates with both our present situation and our aspirations for the future. 

Action, agency, and hope

Even amid this profound reflection on the origins of our values, we still haven’t solved what to do with this loose definition and lack of instruction on how to live a purposeful life. The first concrete choice is this: you can choose to do something, or you can choose to do nothing. Both, sneakily enough, are choices.

Do you want to be complicit in your own suffering or autonomous in your own growth? At the risk of sounding callous or out of touch with the numerous factors far beyond our control that can complicate our ability to do something about our suffering, I do believe we are all able to catalyze change in our lives–at least to some extent–even if that change doesn’t eradicate whatever external factors seem to be causing our suffering.

In fact, moving from inaction to action can be a catalyst for boosting self-efficacy and confidence, and can alleviate our suffering by imbuing us with a sense of agency and hope (Muyan et al., 2015). 

Once we’ve decided that we’d like to be a more active participant in ensuring our life is structured (or unstructured) in a way that’s most likely to bring us meaning and fulfillment, and we’ve gained an understanding of why we have structured our lives in the way they’re currently structured, the question becomes: what do I want more or less of in my life? This question may prompt minor adjustments or necessitate a more substantial overhaul, depending on the individual. 

Alternatively, tangible changes might be more challenging to enact: some of us don’t have the ability to feasibly change our careers, leave the cities we inhabit, or spontaneously manifest a meaningful relationship. In such cases, we may want to consider making changes to our mindset, specifically focusing on how we define and identify meaning within our own lives. 

The balance of being vs doing

A primary belief Heidegger held about self-interpretation is that it is endlessly complicated by, yet simultaneously necessitated by, the averageness of everyday existence; that is, that the implicit and explicit expectations we inherit from simply existing in the world (i.e., vocational tasks, quotidian domesticity, etc.) builds the essential structure of our existence while threatening to absorb us in the very tasks and projects that we must carry out (George, 2025). 

A willingness to lean into the domain of being can be advantageous when tangible change or action feels less achievable. Finding a balance between the doing and the being of existence is an ever-present theme in both antiquated and modern texts, alluding to its persistent relevance. Admittedly, however, we do not belong to a society where a commitment to stillness and reflection is lauded nearly as loudly as a perceptible commitment to productivity. 

Counterintuitive as it may seem, in his book “The Zen of Therapy,” author and psychologist Mark Epstein M.D. imparts a more in-depth understanding of this harmony between finding—or perhaps, maintaining—“oneness” (distance from our ego) while also indulging the ego in pursuit of self-exploration and fulfillment (Epstein, 2022). Psychology reveals that an active resistance to doing can lead to a feeling of being ineffective and unnecessary, whereas an active resistance to being can result in a feeling of being rudderless and existentially discontent (Rönnlund, 2019). 

Finding an appropriate balance between being fully immersed in the movie and pulling oneself out of the plot to appreciate the theatre in which one sits could be a resonant path to contentment and a renewed vision of purpose in life. 

How to find your purpose in life

Finding one’s purpose through navigation of the innumerable variables that contribute to our mode of meaning making, challenging or amending often conflicting value systems we’ve inherited or adopted, befriending our psyche through enhancing our intangible experience of ourselves, and ultimately healing from and rewriting our life’s narrative is a nonlinear process that is enriched by the presence of a supportive other—a trusted therapist. Paramount to this endeavor’s success is the addition of a therapist with whom you feel emotionally safe and trusting, both in intention and interpretation. 

As word and experience are devoid of clear, objective meaning, in that inherent fluidity, we are endowed with the ability—further, the responsibility—to construct a life filled with purpose that may only be visible to us. While this view of purpose may stoke an isolation, loneliness, or disquiet, it may also imbue you with a sense of power, as you are the only person organically equipped with the necessary tools and insights to ascend to a higher version of yourself.