Module 4 · Meaning, purpose & a good life · Lesson 2 of 6

Purpose: found, built or chosen?

Three very different ideas of what having a purpose means.

8 min read · Free — no account needed to read

The idea

People talk about purpose as if everyone has one waiting to be found. Thinkers have answered the question in very different ways, and it helps to know the main ones.

One view is that purpose is found: there is something you are suited to or called to, and the task is to discover it. Another is that purpose is built: it grows from commitments you make and keep over years. A third, from existentialist philosophy, is that purpose is chosen: life does not hand you one, so you create meaning through what you commit to.

You do not have to pick one view forever. But the view you hold changes how you look. If purpose must be found, you search and wait. If it can be built or chosen, you can start with something worthwhile now and let purpose grow out of it.

Why it matters

Many people feel anxious that they have not “found their purpose”. Knowing that purpose can also be built or chosen removes the pressure of a single hidden answer, and makes it possible to act before everything is clear.

See it happen

Mei-Ling is twenty-four and feels behind her friends because she still does not know her purpose. She keeps reading about finding your calling.

The first read

She believes she should wait until she discovers her true calling, so she does not waste years on the wrong path.

With this idea

She reads that purpose can also be built. She commits for a year to something she finds worthwhile — tutoring refugee children in English — and pays attention to what grows from it. By the end of the year she is thinking about training as a teacher.

What changed

She treated purpose as something she could build through commitment, not only a hidden answer to find.

Easy to get wrong

• Believing a purpose must be grand to count. Caring well for a family, a craft or a neighbourhood is purpose too.
• Thinking you can only have one. Many people have several, and they change across a life.

Different perspectives

Reasonable people disagree here. None of these is presented as the final word.

Purpose is discovered

Some traditions hold that each person has a nature or calling, and flourishing comes from finding and living it.

Purpose is created

Existentialists argued there is no purpose built in; people create meaning through their choices and commitments, and are responsible for them.

Purpose is found in response

Frankl argued that meaning is found by responding to what life asks of us — a task, a person, or how we face suffering.

What this rests on

A question to think about. People have argued about this for centuries. There is no single answer — only better questions.

• Existentialist philosophy — Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (1940s) — The view that life does not come with a meaning built in, so people create meaning through their choices — and are responsible for them.
• Viktor Frankl — Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) — A psychiatrist’s account of surviving concentration camps and his argument that people can find meaning even in suffering.
• Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics (c. 340 BCE) — Argues that a good life (eudaimonia, often translated flourishing) comes from living and acting well over a whole life, not from pleasure alone.

Try it: Found, built or chosen?

1. Write which of the three views of purpose feels closest to how you have been thinking.
2. Write one thing you could commit to for six months that you find worthwhile, whether or not it feels like “the” purpose.
3. Write what you would watch for to see if purpose is growing from it.

Reflect

• Has waiting to find a purpose kept you from starting something worthwhile?
• What do you already give time and care to that might be a purpose in the making?

Use it in the coming days

Choose one worthwhile commitment you could make for the next few months and add it to your Vision Board as a direction you are exploring.

Where to do it: My Vision Board

The Vision Board can hold a purpose in progress — something you are building, not yet something you are sure of.