“Find your purpose.”
It sounds beautiful, doesn’t it? It seems like the ultimate answer. We’ve stamped it on Instagram sunsets, packaged it into expensive wellness retreats, and made it the holy grail of the modern age.
We are starved for meaning, so we bought the slogan. I know I did. In fact, when I first started this Substack, “finding your purpose” was exactly what I told creators to do.
I was wrong. After years of writing, observing, and searching, I came to a bitter realization.
It is complete bullshit.
If that slightly offended you... good. We might just be onto something.
The New Religion
To understand where all the emptiness is coming from, we need to take a look at how we are misusing psychology.
For most of human history, we lived inside collective frameworks that gave life meaning. Religion, cultural traditions, and shared myths offered a sense of significance and belonging. They gave us answers to the big questions: Why am I here? What am I meant to do?
During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, everything started to crumble. The institutions lost their authority, the individual became empowered, and church and state were separated.
Until then, purpose was largely defined by religion. Religion and life were so inseparable that the question of your purpose was never asked. We have outgrown the dogmas from the past. We can’t return to blind faith in institutions we no longer believe in.
At the same time, the purely scientific and rationalistic worldview that replaced them is insufficient. By explaining the psyche as a mere byproduct of brain chemistry or reducing human motivation to biological drives, it leaves no room for the soul. It denies the autonomous, spiritual part of ourselves that craves a deeper purpose.
As a response, the human potential movement started to emerge in the 60s. It introduced Abraham Maslow‘s “hierarchy of needs,“ which placed self-actualization at the very top.1 This meant the ultimate goal of human life shifted toward becoming completely self-directed and discovering one‘s own inner motivations.
As we moved away from traditional spiritual beliefs and the supernatural, we adopted a rational framework to explain our existence and give our lives meaning. This led to collective ideologies that take all kinds of forms in sports, politics and even in science.
Finally we have elevated psychology as our new religion to fill the void.
When we use psychology to explain all of human behavior, it overreaches its scientific limits. By claiming absolute, universal truths that apply to all people regardless of time and place, psychology reaches beyond scientific reasoning into the realm of dogmatic certainty and thus easily becomes a substitute for religious belief.2
There is a particular danger in using psychology to find your purpose. It provides a litany of methods to help you, which means the search starts to feel like work.
The Purpose Industry
Once people began searching for their unique purpose, capitalism quickly stepped in to help them find it (and profit from it).
The journey to “find your purpose“ is heavily commercialized, driving massive industries of self-help books, wellness retreats, life coaching, and targeted lifestyle products.3
The whole self-help industry is obsessed with analyzing yourself and finding who you truly are.
We have come to believe that if we analyze ourselves deeply enough, we will reach a point of enlightenment where our problems vanish and our purpose magically reveals itself. You can then finally be yourself and live your purpose.4
Looking at the overwhelming amount of information, courses and tools, it’s funny that only a handful of people seem to have found their purpose. And most of them never consumed the ideas of the self-help industry.
Reality paints a more sobering picture. The obsession with finding your purpose has led to endless introspection. We take personality tests, dig up childhood traumas, and journal endlessly, waiting for an “aha!” moment of purpose that never comes.
The creator economy thrives on this because it happily provides you with more courses, books and frameworks that keep you analyzing and consuming. It keeps thousands of creators in a loop of trying to find their purpose… and then makes them feel bad because they haven’t found it yet.
But people who supposedly found their purpose are not much better off…
The Intellectualized Purpose
Let’s say your purpose is to help people. To do that you build a company that makes a lot of money so you can help a lot of people.
It sounds like a noble mission. I can’t argue if this is your purpose or not. Nobody can argue with that. I mean how could helping people be a bad thing?
Well, our ego is a sneaky bitch…
Humans constantly use intellectual ideologies to justify their behavior and make it socially acceptable. When you say, “I am building a company to make money so I can help people,“ you are using a rational ideology to mask a deeper, perhaps more selfish or irrational drive.
What many people call purpose is actually just a mask for the ego’s drive to be special. That’s why I like to call it Intellectualized Purpose. It doesn’t mean you are a bad or selfish person. It’s just how humans are.
Primitive and ancient man used religion to participate in the irrational forces of nature and the cosmos. We are terrified of these uncontrollable forces, so we use psychology to rationally explain them away. In order to appear scientific and rational, psychology had to deny its religious origin (the soul) and attempt to rationalize our desire for immortality. It acts as a desperate internal attempt to achieve the security that religion once provided externally.
People use these rationalizations because they need them in order to live irrationally while appearing logical and good to society. The ego‘s job is to act as a PR agent. It presents our raw instincts in a socially acceptable form.
We are heavily influenced by our environment. Naturally, we pick up a model of what we ought to do and what’s expected of us. When we operate entirely from a place of what we should do, we are usually submitting to an external ideology rather than acting from our true, autonomous core.
Every ideology comes with a morality. What is good and what is bad, according to this worldview. Morality, in this sense, becomes a tool for conformity that alienates us from our own nature.
If we are judged (or judge ourselves) against a predefined standard, we eventually fall short. You can see this in various forms: a religious doctrine, a social expectation, or an unattainable ideal.
The Intellectualized Purpose falls exactly in this category. It comes with its own set of what’s good and what’s bad. Because humans cannot perfectly live up to these unrealistic ideals, they inevitably fall short, internalizing this failure as feelings of sin, guilt, or inferiority.
In this light “finding your purpose“ acts in the exact opposite way from what it promises, leaving us feeling like we never quite arrived. Like we need more discipline, need to change ourselves or need to find an elusive purpose to be a good person.
The moral conflict isn’t really that big of a problem, because in the end does it matter if you just want to make money for your own gain if at the same time you help people?5
The real problem is that an Intellectualized Purpose still leaves you empty.
The Fear of Death
If we go to such great lengths to find our purpose we should ask where this need to find our purpose comes from in the first place.
Consciousness comes at a very high price. We are the only animals who know they are going to die. It seems like such an obvious fact that we rarely think about the deeper consequences.
Intellectually we perfectly know that we are going to die. But emotionally it scares the shit out of us. Just because we understand it intellectually doesn’t make it any less powerful.
Thinkers like Ernest Becker even argue that the fear of death is central to our being. 6 Everything comes down to it. I agree.
Almost everything we do is an attempt to deny our mortality, so we don’t have to confront our terrifying reality. This creates a deep need to feel significant. We want to stand out, we want to be special, we want to matter. We basically want to control this thing death, so it stops being so scary.
We pretend that we can conquer death, thus our deepest desire is to become immortal. Most of the accomplishments of human history stem from this fact: pyramids, culture, and basically every business.
We want to leave our mark on this world and have an impact that survives beyond our biological self. Ultimately we are looking for “cosmic significance.“
We are all somewhat narcissistic in that sense. It comes as a fundamental part of our psychological makeup. Our natural selfishness feeds on abstract ideas of self-worth, allowing us to expand our sense of self endlessly without regard for the laws of physical reality.
This gives humans a symbolic identity and a mind that can contemplate infinity. Simultaneously, we are housed in a physical body that is destined to decay and die.
Humans are irrational beings more than anything: half animal, half symbolic.
It’s a fact we don’t like much about ourselves, because it makes us helpless against nature. So instead of accepting it we use our intellect to put ourselves at the pinnacle of evolution.
This creates a natural level of self-deception. We hide our selfish and irrational behavior. In other words, we are chronic liars. From an evolutionary perspective it has been beneficial to be a bit delusional about reality.
Our rational mind is the perfect instrument to make this lying so sophisticated that we all agree not to get too close to death.7
All Problems Are Emotional
There is no doubt that science is one of the most amazing accomplishments of human history. But we are really just very smart apes. Science gives us a language to rationalize our irrational nature.8
We use our intellect to control our terrifying biological reality. If we can understand how life works, it gives us a sense of power over nature. So we convince ourselves that we have somehow transcended the reality of life and death. In that process we replaced God with Truth.9
Your purpose then is simply the individual ideology you construct to assure yourself that your life has a neat, logical meaning beyond the grave.
Here is where it gets tricky.
On the other hand, we also have a need to belong and be part of a group. If we stand out we fear that we might get rejected. So instead of saying I want to build a business to stand out, leave a mark on the world and make myself immortal, our intellect invents a socially acceptable, noble narrative to camouflage our true motives.
But unfortunately it leaves us feeling empty. We are trying to solve an emotional problem with a tool of the mind.
Two Ways Creators Hide From The Void
Because we no longer have collective religions to absorb this emptiness and handle our immortality for us, the burden falls entirely on the individual. The crushing weight of trying to justify our own existence leaves us desperate for an elusive purpose.
I see two dominant ways creators are dealing with that:
1. The Perfectionist
The Perfectionist is trying to find the “right” purpose. This sets off an endless search that usually results in a loop of self-improvement. They think they just need to learn more about themselves until they suddenly become enlightened and everything makes sense. Because they will never get to this point they are stuck. They hoard their potential out of fear of making the “wrong“ choice.
Making the wrong choice would mean they stand out and could get rejected by the group (or audience). Instead of asserting their own individuality they want to be saved by an external ideology. But their ego is too strong to submit to one. So, they end up paralyzed.
The search for their purpose is a way of trying to immortalize themselves. They rejected the collective solutions, so they are left all to themselves. Since they can’t find their purpose, they are haunted by an immense fear of an unlived life.
2. The Workaholic
The Workaholic acts much like the Perfectionist but instead of letting fear paralyze them, they use an Intellectualized Purpose to justify their (ego’s) mission. They are not alone, because society already approved it.
They are on an endless quest of trying to be enough by achieving more. This is particularly dangerous because our society rewards this behavior. By exhausting themselves with working, they are essentially trying to fill their void. It allows them to say, “Look how hard I worked today!”
But their purpose is not really coming from their soul, so the Workaholic desperately needs the approval of others. So besides a toll on their bodies, they feel a profound sense of emptiness.
You’re Asking the Wrong Question
You will never find your “purpose.“
It’s like playing chess and asking what the best move in the world is. It’s the wrong question to ask. When I started my Substack, I had identified a lack of purpose as the root problem. So I tried to help creators find their purpose. It implied that once you have found it, the problem is solved. My mistake was that I had been looking only at the symptoms: fear and emptiness.
Most creators already know what they want to do.
They want to create, but they don’t. That’s why they want to find their purpose. It gives them a place to hide because they think it will get easier once they have found their purpose. It won’t. And it’s exactly why calling this feeling emptiness or fear doesn’t help. It’s really guilt and it gets worse the longer they don‘t create. Guilt is much more precise than emptiness or fear. It is directed toward someone.
Think of your life as a loan you have been given, and guilt is the debt you carry just by existing.10
Because you know you will die, you feel the crushing weight of having to do something meaningful with this life. But stepping out of the crowd strips away your safety net. Standing alone exposes your smallness and vulnerability against the fact of your own mortality. You feel guilty for daring to defy death by becoming an individual.
This brings us straight to the core of the actual problem. You can’t get rid of guilt. Even if you refuse to separate to become your unique self, you will feel the guilt of an unused life.
That’s why religion works so well. It provides a purpose big enough to absorb that guilt. But most of us can’t go back to simply obeying a higher calling. You are probably too self-conscious for that. You see through these illusions and can no longer genuinely believe in the grand justifications, leaving you crushed by the guilt you were trying to escape.
The same happens when you are trying to find your purpose inside yourself. You simply can’t bear the amount of guilt all by yourself.
Finding your purpose then is just another illusion that’s destined to fail. Because even if you supposedly find it, you are still terrorized by guilt. And now you‘ve got nothing left to blame.
And this brings us to the most crucial question: how do you pay it off?
Purpose Has to Be Created
First of all you should relax. Life is not meant to be figured out. There is nothing wrong with you.
You are drowning in unused potential. It’s now time to create something with it. I won’t tell you what to create. You already know that.
What I mean by creation is wider than you might think. It can be raising a family, building a business, cultivating a personal philosophy, or mastering an art form. Anything where you turn what‘s inside you into something real. What matters is that it comes from you and not from what you think you should be doing.
The distinction is important, because the Workaholic is creating too. The Perfectionist hides in the search and never uses the loan. The Workaholic hides in the work and believes that if they just build something big enough, the account will finally be settled and they can rest.
In both cases it is a desperate escape from themselves and the inherent guilt of life.
What gets us into trouble is trying to find relief. It’s an illusion. You are really aiming for a state where you stop hesitating. Where what you do lines up so closely with what you actually believe that the doubt has nowhere left to sit. You stop arguing with yourself about whether you are allowed to be a unique individual.
You are not waiting to be “called.“ You are an artist who appoints themself. “I choose to be a writer,“ “I choose to build this business.“
You take the raw, chaotic, irrational material of life and use your creative force to put it into a meaningful shape.
Your business, Substack, or art are just byproducts of that process.
They give you a container, so you can offer your work to the world. The guilt came from separating, so the payment has to travel back to other people. What comes back justifies you to yourself.
When you create, you are using the loan. You are released from the guilt. But only temporarily. Because creation is the ultimate assertion of your individuality, it instantly separates you from the crowd and you are left with guilt again.
The cycle doesn‘t end, but the nature of the guilt changes from paralyzing you to creating you.
This is crucial because death is the only repayment of the loan. So the real question is not about paying it off but what you do with it.
Creation is an act of affirming life. The meaning is in the doing.
The meaning is not hiding in the work, waiting for you to uncover it. You put it there. You decide this matters, then you act as if it does, and the acting is what makes it so.
This is hard work because there is nobody telling you what is right or wrong, nobody motivating you, nobody who is taking the lead. It carries only your own signature.
It’s not a one-time act. It doesn’t get easier, but it gets more meaningful the longer you do it. You cannot force this realization, nor can you logic your way into it. You simply have to keep building your meaning, piece by piece, until the work itself carries you to the very edge of what you can control.
And if you are the one making the meaning, then the thing being built is not the essay or the project. It is whoever is doing the making. You are never finished because you never stop becoming someone.
The greatest work you will ever produce is the creation of your own personality.
That’s much more fulfilling than trying to find your purpose. But it is also much harder because for a writer it means accepting the fact that writing will never get easier. You just have to sit down and write. You are not building a business. You are becoming a writer.
Close the tab and start the most important piece of art you will ever create.
P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life‘s work, not a prison of your own making. But you can‘t build the vessel while the only language you have for yourself is the performance you give for the audience.
I built The Archetype Navigator to give you the words to describe your signature. It shows you how you naturally create, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.
It‘s free, takes five minutes, and it won‘t tell you what to create. You already know that.
Maslow himself grew uneasy with this. Late in his life he placed self-transcendence above self-actualization. It’s an orientation toward something beyond the self, which is considerably closer to what I’m arguing here than the pyramid he gets remembered for. The popular version of Maslow is a simplification he didn’t entirely endorse.
We “invented” psychology (depth psychology in particular) so we don’t sink into insignificance. We trick ourselves by believing we have profound and complex unconscious, so that we can save our individuality. We use psychology as a scientific tool, to prove to ourselves that we are unique and deep. Just like the primitive men did with the soul.
There is an excellent documentary called “The Century of the Self“ that explains this in depth.
Through thinking and analyzing we try to overcome nature and secure our immortality. Understanding ourselves and the world better or psychologizing, gives us the impression that we can control the world.
There is a critical distinction between ethics and morality. Ethics, unlike morality, is not man made but the result of being a human. Morality is a societal, pedagogical construct concerned with the content of what we want. Moral guilt then is actually a defense mechanism. It becomes an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for your own individuality.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Worth knowing that Becker is largely synthesizing Otto Rank here, and is explicit about the debt. Becker is the readable entry point. Rank is where it actually comes from.
The Philosopher Decartes marks a historical turning point. The religious credo ergo sum (I believe, therefore I’m immortal) got replaced by cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).
The science of psychology could only develop by denying its actual object under investigation (the soul). When science reaches its limits it has to either rationalize it or declare it as unscientific, otherwise it would have to admit its own lack of power.
Since we have lost direct access to the spiritual, we have elevated intellectual Truth into a new, subjective religion. This serves only to rescue our desire for immortality through the rational backdoor.
This Otto Rank’s argument, compressed: separating from the collective produces guilt; creative work discharges that guilt by being given to others; and because you keep growing and asserting yourself, the discharge is never final. See Art and Artist and Will Therapy / Truth and Reality. He’s a hard read and badly out of fashion, which I think is a mistake.
I went with your argumentation and felt convinced to me. I think it’s really important that you emphasized the creation through action instead of the perfectionists never ending “search for purpose”.
One approach I would like to add here comes from the startup world and applies perfectly:
Iteration.
Just start acting, feel if that’s the thing and how close it comes to being the thing for you. Each time you can change your course of action slightly and I’m certain you will end up close to what’s your purpose gonna be.
It won't buy you a private jet, but the message is real and honest. Love it.
Are you a fan of Peter Rollins work?