In my last post I wrote that if you want to become the person you want to be you first have to find out what you really want for your life, which is the topic of today’s post. To be honest a phrase like “what you really want for your life” sounds automatically blurry. Can you really know “what you really want”? Most people are not even sure what they want for breakfast and so they just eat any old random thing. What about your life, do you treat it like that as well?
When I was living in East Germany I surely treated my life with as much respect as my morning toast. Every day passed by in a hurry and I was killing time by watching TV, surfing the internet and instant messaging with other people. I spent a lot of my time with just basically nothing, because I just didn’t know what I really wanted. Of course I was often depressed, because my life had no purpose and seemed irrelevant and dull. I blamed it on school and that it could give me no real purpose – it seemed just a waste of my time -, but in fact I was the person who couldn’t give me real purpose. I think most of my time my relationships had to hold as a substitute for purpose back then. A person with a dull and irrelevant life, who is depressed most of the time is no good partner though, which meant that my relationships weren’t really stable. I drifted from depressed-because-I-had-no-purpose to depressed-because-I-felt-lonely and back again. I wasn’t a happy person back then.
When I moved out of my mother’s flat and to West Germany – I was about 17 – I had no fast internet connection and also no TV. This was actually quite refreshing and I started reading a lot. I still had no purpose though, but the more I grew the more stable my relationship attempts became, until I met someone, who was really stable and who stayed with me for 4 years. He was a teacher at my school and as immoral as it seems from his side, he was not to blame at all. I was really after him and we stayed together for a long time, considering that it was a time of change. Only a couple of years after we got together I realized that he couldn’t give me purpose. He didn’t understand it at the time, because he thought he wasn’t enough for me. To be honest I also completely failed to explain what was happening to me and we broke up for a while. Only when I had found a way back to hope we got back together. In retrospect I lost him, because I didn’t have a purpose when I met him. Do you define yourself over the relationship you have?
It still took another few years, a completely screwed up relationship and a burn-out syndrome after that for me to understand the value of purpose: If you don’t have a purpose in your life, you will work for other people’s goals. You will receive your purpose from your spouse, your boss, your religion or from the media.
If you want to have your spouse or your religion as your purpose, that’s fine to me, I’m no-one to judge, but it might be interesting for you to know that your own purpose won’t necessarily be an awful lot different from the one you receive from your religion or spouse! The difference is that you will feel much more in control and much more one with your purpose if you consciously choose it! Let’s say your goal is to serve god, because that’s what you have been taught your entire life – your religion defines your purpose then. What if you consciously choose to make serving god your purpose in life? It doesn’t really change your purpose content-wise, but it certainly does change your relationship towards your purpose! Won’t you be a much better servant, if you really want to be one?
As could be seen in the fallen socialist societies of the East external purpose isn’t the same as your own purpose – it is similar what happens to communal belongings: they receive much less respect than your own, because you didn’t choose to have them. You mostly don’t even consciously realize that you paid for those belongings as well with your taxes! The same happens with purpose – mostly people don’t really realize that their purpose is set by advertisement and presidential speeches, because they don’t pay attention. Suddenly their purpose is getting money to buy crap that they don’t need and suddenly people approve of war against terrorism “because it’s a good cause”, but wait a minute where did that come from actually and what is the secret agenda of those people who planted the seed of this idea in your head? Do you really want to work for other people’s secret agendas? Do you want your son to die for a secret agenda?
Having your own purpose will make you do what needs to be done much more easily. I often feel the impact of this when talking to other students: if the reason for studying is that you need a degree badly and that you need it to get a good well-paid job to become wealthy and successful, your purpose is external: society forces you to get a degree in order to get a good job. Society also planted the purpose “becoming wealthy and successful” in your mind through media and indoctrination. I don’t necessarily say it’s a bad purpose (even though it’s definitely not a good one in my opinion), I just say it’s another external purpose that in fact means nothing to you in reality. With purposes like these you won’t be happy for achieving your goal of getting a degree, because the degree is only one step to yet another goal – becoming wealthy and successful. Once you become wealthy and successful you will be happy though, right? No, wrong! You will realize that becoming wealthy and successful wasn’t really what you wanted after all – people paraphrase that with “money isn’t everything”, right?
What if you set being wealthy and successful as your own purpose by conscious choice? Well, that doesn’t change the content of your purpose, remember? The purpose isn’t “better” or “worse” just because it is your own, so even if you choose that, it might be a really shallow purpose that doesn’t make you happy after all! You will just work harder to live your life according to your purpose if you consciously choose it. Don’t only choose your purpose: Choose it wisely as well!
What is a good purpose then and how do you choose it? Well, “good” and “bad” are rather subjective categories – even though we might have common opinions in society which stem from our cultural heritage. There is vast philosophical literature on “good and evil” and there we find a rather detached analysis of the matter at hand. To mention only one example which is reflected in the philosophical discussion: We in our Western society consider killing old people when they can’t take care of themselves as pretty evil, while Inuits at least in the past considered it as a fair practice to save their elderly from starvation and pain (even though assisted suicide was much more common – for more on the subject in an easily understandable matter read this). Good and evil aren’t as universal as we think and are mostly cultural constructs. Nevertheless they are pretty universal within the same culture and that’s what matters if you think about how to live your life in our Western society, right? Therefore remember your own cultural heritage when you choose a purpose – to rob and kill as many people as possible would certainly be a bad purpose!
Apart from the universal aspects of your purpose deciding on a good one is mainly a matter of your own beliefs and opinions – e.g. if you want to become wealthy to help people who are not, it reflects your own personal opinion that helping poor people is good. Does a good purpose have to be altruistic? Does an egoistic purpose make you a bad person? No, certainly not. If you want to know how egoism can contribute to the greater good, please refer to Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own, which provides a very interesting perspective on the topic. Your purpose should reflect your own personality and not what you think you should find right and good. If your purpose is something which you think you should do, then it certainly comes from some kind of indoctrination again and it won’t be your own!
Interestingly enough I uncovered another layer of reflection that seems to be connected with finding your own purpose: Finding out who you actually are! This also draws upon the value of realistic evaluation that I gave a lot of thought in this post. If you now think that becoming who you really want to be is rather circular business, then you’re very right and it’s not a bad thing. It means that on your way to becoming who you want to be you will learn a lot of useful skills that will help you in a lot of different aspects of the process and maybe with other situations in your life as well!
Read selfdev. to find out who you actually are and how to choose a purpose for your life on that basis.
