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.
I’m with you on rejecting the idea that somewhere out there is a single, preordained purpose waiting to be discovered, after which the rest of life suddenly makes sense.
That notion can do more harm than good, especially for younger people who may experience ‘purpose’ as another standard they are somehow failing to meet.
Where I part company with your thinking is in throwing the concept of purpose out with the mythology surrounding it.
Developmentally, the evidence points toward a more nuanced proposition. Purpose isn’t something we “find” so much as something we form as a hypothesis, test against lived experience, revise, and eventually understand more clearly after we have accumulated enough life.
Jung’s second half of life, Maslow’s movement toward self-transcendence, Frankl’s emphasis on meaning, and Kegan’s work on self-authorship approach the question from very different traditions, yet they converge around a common developmental movement. One you see it, you can’t unsee it…it’s pretty cool, actually.
None of these thinkers’ frames of reference require believing that we arrived with a vocational treasure map hidden inside us.
We build identities. We succeed inside them or we don’t. Sometimes we outgrow them, lose them, or suffer through periods when they no longer cohere. Only later can we recognize what persisted underneath those different versions of ourselves.
That is closer to a process of discovering continuity than to “finding your purpose” in the Instagram sense.
As you’ll see from me on Sunday, the question becomes more interesting at midlife precisely because one finally has enough evidence.
I’ve been building toward this argument across the first ten essays in my series this month, mostly through lived experience but also leaning heavily on depth psychology.
In essay eleven, I’m finally revealing more of the developmental scaffolding underneath it.
It offers a counterargument to yours, although I suspect it is really more of a refinement.
Purpose as something that can become legible through development, self-authorship, rupture, testing, and retrospective coherence; not purpose as destiny.
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?
Hi Philip,
I’m with you on rejecting the idea that somewhere out there is a single, preordained purpose waiting to be discovered, after which the rest of life suddenly makes sense.
That notion can do more harm than good, especially for younger people who may experience ‘purpose’ as another standard they are somehow failing to meet.
Where I part company with your thinking is in throwing the concept of purpose out with the mythology surrounding it.
Developmentally, the evidence points toward a more nuanced proposition. Purpose isn’t something we “find” so much as something we form as a hypothesis, test against lived experience, revise, and eventually understand more clearly after we have accumulated enough life.
Jung’s second half of life, Maslow’s movement toward self-transcendence, Frankl’s emphasis on meaning, and Kegan’s work on self-authorship approach the question from very different traditions, yet they converge around a common developmental movement. One you see it, you can’t unsee it…it’s pretty cool, actually.
None of these thinkers’ frames of reference require believing that we arrived with a vocational treasure map hidden inside us.
We build identities. We succeed inside them or we don’t. Sometimes we outgrow them, lose them, or suffer through periods when they no longer cohere. Only later can we recognize what persisted underneath those different versions of ourselves.
That is closer to a process of discovering continuity than to “finding your purpose” in the Instagram sense.
As you’ll see from me on Sunday, the question becomes more interesting at midlife precisely because one finally has enough evidence.
I’ve been building toward this argument across the first ten essays in my series this month, mostly through lived experience but also leaning heavily on depth psychology.
In essay eleven, I’m finally revealing more of the developmental scaffolding underneath it.
It offers a counterargument to yours, although I suspect it is really more of a refinement.
Purpose as something that can become legible through development, self-authorship, rupture, testing, and retrospective coherence; not purpose as destiny.