A guaranteed guide to finding your purpose in life

In a happy ending, Gilmore Girls kind of world, your purpose would be easy to figure out, you would have been born with it and it would come very naturally to you. But in the real world, it doesn’t work like that. In the real world, watching TV (preferably Gilmore Girls) is easier than sitting down and digging deep into my feelings to find my so-called purpose.

In the days of social media, people posing and posting their lives for anyone who happens to care, having a direction in life is necessary. Otherwise, what kind of story are you telling? There needs to be a plot line, something to tell people. We have all become characters in our own stories, stories we often make up and that have little to do with the reality of life.

Stories are dominating our lives. We binge our favourite shows, we go to the movies, we read novels, we read gossip magazines, we play story-based video games. It seems that our lives should be stories, neatly fitting into a genre, following the rules of storytelling. If we slip, we have to rise from the ashes. If we do wrong, we have to beg for forgiveness until we receive it.

Trying to find our purpose is the most human endeavour I can think of. When I watch my cat play with a paper ball and chase it around the flat as if it were the only thing that mattered, I can’t imagine this cat ever wasting a second thinking about his life’s purpose.

So, maybe in the real world, having one singular purpose to focus on is unrealistic, a perfectionist’s view of life. Maybe, in the real world, we have to purposefully live our lives, not live our purpose. If I wake up, and purposefully make my coffee, purposefully cook my breakfast, purposefully go to my job, purposefully love the people around me, purposefully read my books, maybe even purposefully watch Gilmore Girls, then, maybe, life itself could become my purpose.