Purpose in Life: Why You Can’t Find Yours, and Where It Hides

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

Your purpose in life usually isn’t one big mission hidden somewhere, waiting to be found. It’s what grows when you notice what’s true inside you, make something from that place, and then find out how the world values it. If you can’t find yours, it’s rarely because you don’t have one. It’s because performance, comparison and the need to prove yourself are standing on top of it.

You’ve read the books. You’ve written lists of your values on a Sunday night and lost them by Tuesday. Everyone else seems to have a thing. And you’re lying awake asking the question that sounds too big to say out loud: what am I actually for?

I didn’t find mine on a vision board. I found the first real clue in a kitchen I’d begged not to work in.

Esalen had invited me to stay, and they put me in the kitchen, the one place I said I absolutely didn’t want to work. Two days a week I made the entire salad bar for two hundred people, all from scratch. I was frightened I wasn’t capable. I wanted to say please, just let me wash dishes. Nobody gets kicked out for being bad at washing dishes.

But I showed up. I leaned on my charm to get help, chopped, steamed, improvised and sweated my fears. And then I took the tea towels off the dishes and saw the colours, the textures, the beauty. I genuinely surprised myself. I can create. Who knew.

That wasn’t my purpose. It was a clue. Something real in me had touched the world and come back alive.

What’s really going on

If something in you sighed, or something in you said “fine, but I still need a plan,” notice both. That second voice is the one that’s been running the search.

Our culture turns everything into something that has to justify itself. Everything must be useful, must scale. So purpose stops being a living thing and becomes another project. Another thing to optimise. Another way to fall behind.

In my book I use an older word for what you’re looking for. Vocation. Vocation is knowing what is true inside you, creating from that place, and then finding how that truth is valued by the world. It’s work, including creative work, that comes from the organic self rather than from performance, panic, or the need to outrun shame. It would still feel meaningful if no one were watching.

Vocation isn’t a thing you find and then protect. It’s the ongoing practice of responding honestly to being alive and affected. The mechanical version goes like this: notice what’s touching you, feel where it lands, and let your craft be the truthful response. The practice is the input. The work is what comes out.

So you make sense. Purpose isn’t a conclusion you can think your way to. It’s a response.

Why it feels so hard to find your purpose

Your survival is taking all the room. Vocation can sound like a privilege. Try saying it to someone working two jobs to feed a family. There’s real dignity in the shift, in the job worked to keep people fed, and I’ll never sneer at survival. My own mother endured decades of it. If that’s where you are, your purpose might be living in the margins for now. That still counts.

You keep asking whether it will be valued first. I heard David Friedberg on the All-In podcast say he asks his children what they made today, and then whether someone else valued it. For a grown craftsman, fair enough. But a vocation has to germinate slowly, long before it has to meet a price the market will pay. If you price every interest the day you notice it, nothing gets the chance to grow.

You think you’re not the creative type. You don’t need an inner painter. My creativity survived because it never had to earn a penny or an audience. Cooking. Music. Dancing with the blinds pulled. That unperformed creativity is what kept me alive long enough to have something to work from. It might be the source of yours.

Your ego has already got its hands on it. Even a real calling can get colonised. When I first learned Gestalt communication, it was liberating. Then I got good at it, good enough to spot everyone else’s defences, and I grew a quiet sense of superiority over people who didn’t talk that way. I was not more sovereign. I was just better armed. If your purpose has turned into a way to be better than people, it’s gone fiat on you.

The loop, on your situation

The practice underneath all of this is one I learned from Aftab Omer: reflexive participation. What am I noticing now, how am I affected, and what creative action is being called for? Run it on the last moment you felt even slightly alive.

Get ground in your body first

Feet on the floor. One long breath out, longer than the in-breath.

What happened

One plain sentence about a recent moment you lost track of time. “I spent two hours fixing a bike and forgot my phone.”

Where it lands in the body

Remember it and notice what happens inside. A warmth in the chest. Energy in the hands. Stay with it for a breath. And now what do you notice?

Who’s driving

Then notice who shows up to argue. “That’s not a career.” “Who’d pay for that?” That’s a protector. It usually carries one of two coins: too much (who do you think you are) or not enough (you’d never be good enough). Thank it. It’s trying to keep you from being disappointed.

Trace it

Only as far as today needs. What were you praised for as a child, and what were you told was a waste of time?

Feel it and tell someone

Say it out loud to someone who’s glad to hear it: “I lit up doing this and I don’t know what it means yet.” You don’t need a plan to be met.

One creative action

Make one small thing from that place this week, for nobody. Cook it, write it, build it, fix it. Show it to no one. The point is to feel what it’s like to make something because it’s true, not because it’ll be valued.

How to find your purpose in life, honestly

Stop looking for the big reveal. There wasn’t one moment when it shifted for me. It was many. I left finance, lived at Esalen, became a therapist and found work that was actually mine.

Follow aliveness, not approval. I don’t primarily see myself as a technician therapist. I see myself as an artist. My craft is creating living, breathing moments of emotional change inside a person and between two people. I’d never have found that by asking what the market wanted.

Protect the places where nothing needs to get better. For me it’s the ocean and the dance floor. Without them, purpose gets corrupted into another identity to defend.

And keep practising. The moment I coast on the version of my work the world has already applauded, my vocation starts to calcify into performance. Purpose is something you keep doing, not something you keep.

One thing to do tonight

Before bed, write down three moments from the past month when you felt most alive. Not proudest, not most productive. Most alive. Then look for what they have in common: a person, a place, a kind of attention, your hands. That’s not your purpose yet. It’s the clue.

Would therapy help with this?

Coaching is how we go from where you are now to where you want to go. We only address the past when it emerges in the present. If you’re working, functioning and just hungry for something that’s actually yours, that’s often the right size of help.

But if the question “what’s the point” has turned into feeling empty most of the time, if nothing brings you any joy, or if you can’t get out of bed, that can be depression, and it deserves real care. Please talk to a licensed therapist where you live.

The path

What I’ve just walked you through is the Empathi Method. For an individual, it’s built on my Proof of Work of Being Human protocol: building sovereign ground inside yourself. On the Aliveness ground, that means making room for the parts of you that don’t need to prove anything.

There are two ways to keep going. You can start now with Figlet, an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, on the Aliveness ground, and it’ll help you notice what lights you up and take one small step from there. Or you can get on the list for the book and the live program with me, where we do this work together.

The tea towels are still there on your dishes. You don’t have to know what’s underneath to lift one corner.

I go deeper into this in my book, Proof of Work (Greenleaf Book Group Press, February 2027).

Common questions

What if I don’t have a purpose in life?

You’re not broken. Most people don’t have one clear mission. Purpose tends to grow from small moments of feeling alive, practised over time, rather than arriving all at once.

Can your purpose in life change?

Yes. What you’re responding to changes as your life changes. A purpose that can’t change is often an identity you’re defending.

How do I know when I’ve found my purpose?

You’ll feel it in your body before you can explain it. Time stretches, you stop watching yourself, and the work would still feel worth doing if nobody saw it.

Reflexive participation comes from the teaching of Aftab Omer at the Institute of Imaginal Studies, where I trained.