The Myth of One True Purpose

A couple of weeks ago, I stood in a room filled with love, laughter, and the kind of joy that comes from celebrating a friend’s 30th birthday. Food was served, music blared, and everyone shouted over one another. We raised glasses, cheering impassioned speeches about the new season in our friend’s life.

At the edge of that brightness, I found myself chatting to someone who felt empty inside. The conversation started when I asked them if they were satisfied with their life, and they didn’t hesitate, emphatically saying “no”. On paper, they were successful. Competent. Experienced. The sort of person colleagues rely on because they always deliver. But, as we spoke, their shoulders folded inward, their voice softened, and their eyes drifted somewhere far away, to somewhere that clearly hurt.

“I’m good at what I do,” they said. “But it feels like I’m disappearing in it.”

Around us, the celebration swelled, yet the person in front of me looked like someone slowly fading from their own life. Not because they were inactive or unproductive. Quite the opposite. They were busy, overwhelmed, running on fumes. Desperate for meaning.

They weren’t lost because they lacked ability.

They were lost because they lacked purpose.

They’d spent years in the same field, building expertise, climbing ladders, doing everything “right”. But that same journey that once seemed full of potential had become a cage. They could feel it. They were paying the bills, being responsible, but not really living a life.

And yet, despite their desperation for change, they were terrified of making a move. They doubted themselves. They had lost their purpose, didn’t know where to look next, and felt pressure to choose a path that would serve them for life.

Years can fly past, if we're paralysed by purpose.

There’s this prevailing myth that, unless we’ve identified our one great calling, our Life's Purpose, we’re somehow failing at life. It whispers that the older we get without having it “all figured out”, the more of a loser we are. And it tells us that purpose is predetermined and singular, like a treasure buried somewhere in our twenties that, if missed, renders everything afterwards a long, wasteful, detour.

But life doesn’t work that way. Purpose isn’t a proclamation. It’s an evolution.

Reflecting on my own journey, I see that my own purpose has shifted shape many times. In my entrepreneurial years, I wanted to build businesses that made the world better, using biodegradable packaging, donating profits to causes I cared about, doing anything that let me contribute meaningfully to my customers and the world. When life happened, and finances tightened, I pivoted to consulting. Not because I lost my desire to do good, but because I needed a new channel for it, one that also helped me pay my bills. Eventually, that path led me to the UN, where the work took on a different texture but carried the same underlying thread of intention: to leave people and places better than I found them.

Very few of us have a crystal clear purpose from a young age. Most of us don’t see the thread clearly until later. We discover it by living, by experimenting, by trying things that excite us and abandoning the things that drain us. Our purpose reveals itself in hindsight.

If we’re lost, we shouldn’t look for a single, overarching purpose to govern an entire lifetime. That’s overwhelming. Instead, perhaps the question we should ask is simply: what is my purpose for now? What is life asking of me in this season? Not over the next decade, not the next career arc, not until the end of my days… but right now?

A purpose-for-now is enough to move us forward. Enough to spark energy where things have gone dim. Enough to help us make decisions without the paralysing pressure of needing to map out the rest of our life. Perhaps it’s choosing one small step that feels alive again, something that gives us enough momentum to get moving.

When we let purpose be seasonal, we give ourselves permission to evolve. To grow out of old ambitions. To welcome new ones. To change direction without shame. Life itself is seasonal; it makes sense that our purpose would be too.

As the birthday celebration went on and conversation with my dinner partner progressed, I noticed a subtle shift. Their posture had straightened. Their eyes were brighter. Not because we had solved their existential crisis in our single conversation, but because the pressure had eased. They no longer felt the need to decide the purpose of their next thirty years. They only needed to decide the purpose of their next step.

That, I realised, is the thread of purpose running through my own life. It’s the part of me drawn to help others find their footing when the ground beneath them feels uncertain. Not through grand declarations, but through small moments of clarity, one conversation at a time. I still don't know what my Life's Purpose is, exactly, but it is slowly taking shape as I continue taking steps.

So, dear reader, if you’re feeling the weight of not knowing your Life’s Purpose, release it. Ask yourself: What is the meaningful thing my life is asking of me now?

Let that be enough. The rest will reveal itself in time.

Until next week,

Ric.