Overthinking Your Purpose is Making You Miserable

Happy Thursday!

I jumped on the question trend on Twitter this week:

It’s a question that fascinates me. The answer is undoubtedly nuanced and multi-faceted, but one common theme kept popping up: Purpose.

The modern world makes it incredibly difficult to connect to purpose: it’s easy to overthink purpose and to feel small and insignificant in the shadow of giants.

I believe a lack of purpose is one of the biggest problems in modern society, and it affects young men in particular.

This week’s article is my perspective on the purpose crisis + some strategies to help you stop overthinking your purpose and what it means to live meaningfully.

Firstly, I want to shout out a great new newsletter I’ve discovered: The Level Up Library by Oli Barton.

Oli has some fantastic perspectives on productivity; The Level Up Library helps people who want to do more with their time create systems to achieve effortless productivity.

There are new issues every week - check it out here!

The question comes from my fiance.

She got her Ph.D. in neuroscience last year, and after starting a few positions that weren’t quite right, she’s finally landed a lab role in Montréal that she likes.

We’ve been settling into our normal life routine — hence the “is this it” inquiry.

It’s common for people in her situation to be confronted by existential questions.

For many, the first quarter to a third of life is a sequence of clear goals.

People go through this sequence only to be smacked in the face with a giant “Now what?”

What’s the next step from here?

There isn’t a clear answer to this question — the answer to this question is the answer to the meaning of life.

And that means there isn’t an objective answer: meaning is something you get to choose.

But one thing is certain: you must choose something for your meaning.

A human needs purpose like a Kardashian needs Instagram.

One of the biggest problems facing people today is a crisis of purpose.

It’s a natural product of the expansion of the community to becoming incomprehensibly large.

We’ve evolved to perceive ourselves in smaller communities of approximately 150 people.

The role you play in a community of this size is obvious.

But in a community of 150,000? Or a million? Or 8 billion!?

It’s easy to lose track of how your contributions matter when you’re a small fish in a massive ocean.

And then, you naturally look to the most impressive achievements of the community and judge your efforts compared to them.

If you define having a purpose by something as grandiose as trying to cure cancer or take humans to Mars (thanks, Elon), then what chance do you have of seeing your efforts as meaningful?

This is the purpose trap.

You overthink your purpose by comparing it to the most extreme examples in a community much larger than you’ve evolved to comprehend.

To avoid the purpose trap, you need to stop getting carried away with overthinking what it means to have a purpose.

I have a few suggestions for this.

Be Grateful

Abraham Maslow was an American Psychologist famous for defining a hierarchy of human needs.

You’ve certainly heard of it; it’s creatively called “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.”

The five levels of the hierarchy are:

People struggling to put food on the table for their families or worrying about whether their city will be bombed next week are not thinking about their purpose.

If you have the mental bandwidth to struggle with existential questions like “Is this it?” and “how do I find my purpose,” you’re on level five.

You undoubtedly have a lot to be grateful for.

Most humans haven’t struggled with the question of purpose because surviving was so challenging — purpose was obvious.

Purpose involved not dying for long enough to pass on your genes. If you succeeded, your goal was to continue avoiding those pesky saber-toothed tigers, finding calories, and getting busy procreating again.

Modern humans have taken all the challenges out of surviving, and we’ve naturally leveled up on the pyramid. It doesn’t mean we have no problems, but our problems are better.

As frustrating as it can be to feel listless and like your contributions don’t matter, you can change your perspective:

Be grateful that you’ve been born in a time and place where you have the privilege to wrestle with the conundrum of your purpose because your immediate survival and well-being aren’t threatened.

Be The 3rd Bricklayer

The parable of the Three Bricklayers:

Three bricklayers are building a church.

When asked what they’re doing, the first responds:

The second:

And the third:

As long as you’re not dealing crack, involved in human trafficking, or working for Goldman Sachs, I am positive that your contributions to the World are good.

You have the ability to change your perspective on how you see what you do.

You can be cynical and view your contribution as one-dimensional, like the first bricklayer.

Or, you can step back and look at the ripple effects of your effort.

Even if you’re working for a large company, your role in that company is vital. You wouldn’t be paid thousands of dollars annually to do it if it weren’t.

If you believe in what the company is doing (which you should if you’re working there), you are essential to making that mission a reality.

We don’t have robots to do everything yet.

The World still operates on the back of human labor. If the farmers, doctors, engineers, teachers, and all the other hard-working people decided not to show up to work, we’d be back in the dark ages within a week.

What you do matters.

It might not seem like it, but it does.

Be the third bricklayer: take a step back and see your contributions as part of a bigger picture.

Your Purpose Isn’t Set In Stone

You’ll grow and evolve as your progress through life. As you do this, your purpose will change. That’s okay.

This isn’t a communist country where you get labeled with a career at 13, and then it’s tattooed to your forehead, and that’s it.

Your purpose will change as you make progress on your self-development journey.

The thought that you need to choose something that locks you in is part of what causes you to overthink their purpose. You see it as a big and scary choice that you have to commit to.

Purpose comes in different stages, and if you’re feeling restless and confronted with existential questions, it is a sign that a new phase of purpose is on your horizon.

In “The Way of the Superior Man,” David Deida suggests that people in this stage need to dial down external stimuli and spend a lot of time reflecting.

Go for long walks.

Stop scrolling on social media.

Let yourself be bored.

If you turn off the noise and let your thoughts marinate, you’ll observe patterns in your thinking. You’ll reflect on the ideas you keep returning to — you’ll learn to follow your curiosity.

Pull on the threads of your curiosity, and the next stage of your purpose will unveil itself to you.

Don’t Try To Change The World

You paralyze yourself with doubt and uncertainty when you imagine that your purpose has to be some big, hairy, audacious plan to change the world and land you on the cover of Time magazine.

In the evolution of your purpose, you inevitably have to start small. The best way to start small is by solving your immediate problems.

You can’t change the world when your own house is still a mess.

The first step is always to get your life together. Your purpose may be to get in great shape.

It may be to get out of your head and create content online.

It could be finding a healthy relationship.

Don’t shy away from starting with a small purpose. Embrace starting small. Start with your own problems.

Problem-solving compounds.

Once you embrace your purpose to solve your own problems, the natural next step can be to help others solve what you have figured out.

As you progress with solving your own problems, you find bigger and better ones to solve.

Help others transcend the same barriers you’ve encountered, and before you know it, you will have a life (and maybe a business) based on a clear and coherent purpose.

But this purpose would have been impossible to articulate at the beginning of your journey.

You would have only arrived here by solving your own problems and continuously iterating and growing.

Don’t be afraid to start small.

Relentless pursuit of a seemingly small purpose can evolve to have a tremendous impact.

Your purpose doesn’t have to be to cure disease or save the planet.

You have the ability to view your life through the lens of purpose now if you act as the 3rd bricklayer.

Your purpose isn’t fixed — it will change and evolve as you do. And it’s perfectly okay to start small: follow the path that begins with solving your own problems.

And never forget — be grateful to have the privilege to concern yourself with purpose because you can pull out your phone and order a double bacon cheeseburger in less than 10 seconds.

Thanks for reading!

And if you’re looking to make 2023 the year where you make a permanent change to your health and fitness, I still have two open spots for a free Fitness Roadmap Call.

You’ll get an actionable strategy to achieve your goals, including:

• Personalized workout & nutrition plan

• Identification of lever-moving habits

• Clarity for the best way to achieve (and sustain) your goals.

Check it out here!