you don't need purpose
There was a period of a few months where if I was asked (by friend, interview, or otherwise) what exactly is my philosophy or purpose for living life, I would answer something along the lines of: I want to be more like a kid. Meaning, I wanted to do more of the things I did the most of when I was younger.
I mainly did three things outside of school as a kid: read books, play video games, and make stuff.
That's what I told these people. I don't have some kind of altruistic drive to exonerate the world from the confines of the living prison we gradually ensnare ourselves into year after year. I'm selfish. I want to feel happy. I want to be around people I love and who love me. It's a blunt and exceptionally short-sighted stance to take, but I could care less about having a much more grandiose perspective on the world because by the time a lot of that stuff matters, I'll be dead.
Which isn't to say that I never consider other people or pressing social issues that arise. I just tend to simplify my worldview into a way that works for me. I want to live a life that lets me do more of those three things. I like these things. I know it's such a simple pattern of thought that it's almost stupid, but I want to be a kid again. I want to be greedy, to handle things with reckless abandon and seek out explorations important only for myself without having any principles of approval or responsibility applied. I wish I still had the liberty to say I didn't know better.
It goes without saying that I'll never be a kid again. And I sure as hell know better. At this point I'm a bit older than kid-age, and you can't quite reverse the life developments and mental adjustments and external expectations that come with years upon years of responsibility heaped upon you. Of course I can't just do those three things and tune out the incessant noise of literally the entirety of life around me. Nevertheless, I still try. I mean, I got two of the three down: I hole myself up in different places to read a bunch of books and I make stuff for my job (it's hard to find the time to sink hours and hours into video games now). I tried to optimize around a career path/industry that would give me the greatest amount of flexibility in terms of my work day, and that (in an ideal scenario) would allow me to even work on games. But is this even a purpose? In my selfishness do I find a meaningful life? Whatever. I’m straying from the point. This is not a post about myself.
There's an awful lot of discourse around purpose these days. Either it's about establishing one early on and abiding your life by a prescribed set of values, or it's sorting it out as you live each day, the development of that amorphous blob floating over you that by an unknown process undergoes deposition to something you can touch and feel and before you know it, boom, you have a purpose.
Well, it's either these two options, or you don't have one. If you don't have one, you're supposedly left adrift at sea, floating upon the scattered wreckage of the poor ship you once set sail on many years ago before it ran aground.
But to be real with you, I feel like it's not that important to have a purpose. At least it's not as important as people are saying it is on every platform imaginable. Sure, it can give you that added boost of motivation or discipline or provide some sort of reflective glass upon which you can bounce yourself right off, helping you conclude whether or not a choice that you're making is the right one. But having a purpose, to me, just seems to be another one of those self-helpy things that have entered into the public canon as something that you should have personally ascribed as a measure to withstand the constant surge of time crashing upon your own inner, eroding rocks of self.
Many of us continue to pray at the altar to this self-help, productivity canon. Whether we realize it or not. But what if you don't live your life according to some extremely stable set of values? What if you, God forbid, figured it out as you go? I'd wager that your life probably wouldn't be too different. Regardless of whether or not you carried an eternal flame of purpose within you, I think we always make decisions around things we care about. Actions don't follow this so-called purpose, but rather purpose is a contrived label for the scorching metal melted down and molded from the aggregate of our actions over time. If you keep doing things the way you think you should be doing them, more often than not, you'll see what you actually care about. This could just be my own ignorant bias for action speaking, but you figure yourself out a lot faster if you just keep on driving and driving and driving until you reach the edge of the cliff. Maybe you'll drive off the cliff, or you'll turn around and loop back, but either way by doing so you will have a much deeper understanding of the roadways and tunnels that map your thoughts and beliefs and ultimately what you care most about.
I don't think you can ever waste time if you do exactly that. If you keep on going to find out. Our conception of wasting time is often in a productive sense — What if I could have been allocating my time towards something that I actually cared about? To me, it's that same time-wasting process where you drag yourself through the mud, dirt, thorns, bruised and battered to the ugly end that allows you to reach the most hidden conclusions. Spending too much time daydreaming and connecting dots with lines will leave you with much less insight compared to if you committed and found out for yourself. Only by razing down the earth can you shake that lingering, indescribable something tied around your leg that threatens to drag you into the depths. It’s a repossessive act to pursue your own irreverent practice free of purpose — without asking any question of what or why or how we owe each other.