Yeah, that old chestnut

Hello Philippa! How does a person get a purpose in life, is my basic question? Especially as I’m approaching mid 60s (mind blowing number!) I never married, didn’t want children. Still ok with that decision. Big but. I didn’t really replace family life for career either. I had a few jobs, various socially responsible things and took early retirement a few years ago, in order to spend time volunteering and going to the cinema/art galleries as is my wont. I’m bored with my unadventurous lifestyle but scared to jump in any direction. Covid was horrific and glorious and I really learned how to be alone, and I’m alone a fair amount of time. Something is definitely missing. Catching up with old friends, I have nothing to update them on! I’d like to travel more and deal with the anxiety that engenders. But apart from that, and being fitter so I can age well, I’m a blank page. How do I work out which direction to go in? Thanks a million.

My Reply

I wonder whether one of the difficulties with purpose is that we often imagine it as something we discover rather than something we make. We speak about “finding our purpose” as though there is a folded piece of paper hidden somewhere in the back of a drawer with the answer written on it and our job is to find it.

Perhaps you are waiting for certainty before taking action? Meaning grows in the opposite direction. We become interested in something, commit ourselves to something, become involved with people or places or ideas and only later realise that a sense of purpose has gathered around those experiences. So start something, anything rather than waiting for a sense of purpose.

There may be another difficulty too, which is that for much of our lives purpose arrives already attached to our circumstances. Education gives us goals to work towards and problems to solve; jobs make demands on our time and energy; children, if we have them, require our care and attention; parents often grow older and need us in turn. We may complain about these obligations whilst we are carrying them, but they spare us from another question entirely, namely: what shall I do with my freedom?

Perhaps this is one reason why retirement can feel so disorientating. Freedom is usually presented as an uncomplicated blessing, but philosophers have often regarded it with more suspicion than that. Jean-Paul Sartre described us as being “condemned to be free”. By this he meant that once external structures fall away, we become responsible for deciding what sort of life we are going to lead and that responsibility can feel remarkably similar to anxiety.

Are you are suffering less from a lack of purpose than from an excess of freedom? Nobody is telling you what comes next. There is no obvious script left to follow and nobody handing out instructions. There is a loneliness in that, but there is possibility too, although possibility has a habit of disguising itself as emptiness.

Erich Fromm wrote Escape from Freedom, in which he argued that people often imagine they want freedom until they possess it. Once we are free we discover that freedom comes with uncertainty and responsibility and many of us immediately begin searching for somebody or something to tell us how to live. Reading your letter, I wonder whether part of you is waiting to be assigned a purpose rather than risking the anxiety involved in creating one.

You mention catching up with old friends and feeling you have nothing to tell them. It sounded as though you may have picked up the idea that conversation is a report on achievements and activities, that we must have done something before we are entitled to have something to say. Yet some of the richest conversations are not about what we have done at all. They are about questions we are living with, books we have read, ideas we are wrestling with, fears we are carrying, changes we notice in ourselves, or whether life requires a purpose in the first place.

There are perhaps different ways of being alive and I wondered whether you may have become rather stranded in doing. What should I do next? What should I take up? Where should I travel? What project should I have? Thinking and feeling can be sources of meaning too, there’s more to being than just doing. Might put that on a t shirt.

There is nothing like philosophy when we are searching for meaning. Viktor Frankl survived the concentration camps and emerged with the idea that life asks something of us rather than the other way around. Meaning, he believed, often emerges through creating something, through loving someone or something outside ourselves, or through the attitude we bring to experiences we cannot avoid. Reading your letter, I wondered whether your volunteering, your interest in art and film and your wish to travel may already contain more meaning than you currently give them credit for.

Aristotle was less interested in purpose than in flourishing. He asked what sort of habits, relationships and activities allow a person to live well. His answer was not fame, success or excitement but participation, friendship, curiosity and contribution to the community around us. Modern studies back him up!

I think it was Marcus Aurelius who first implied that we have little control over outcomes but some influence over what we choose to do next. Reading your letter, I wondered whether anxiety may have persuaded you that you need to know where a road leads before stepping onto it. Marcus Aurelius would probably suggest that most roads reveal themselves by walking them.

For a more modern companion, I would suggest Irvin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun and perhaps also his Existential Psychotherapy. Yalom writes about ageing, mortality and purpose without pretending there are easy answers. He understands that becoming aware that time is finite can bring questions to the surface that were easier to ignore at forty.

Maybe the book to start with could be Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, which introduces thinkers not as historical figures but as people trying to solve recognisable problems such as disappointment, inadequacy, frustration and uncertainty about how to live.

You describe yourself as a blank page and I was not entirely convinced. I could already see someone interested in art, cinema, ideas, travel, volunteering and ageing well. That sounds less like an absence of material and more like somebody standing in front of several doors whilst wishing someone else would tell her which one to open.

Perhaps purpose is less like destiny and more like a conversation that develops over time.

If I were prescribing anything, it might be curiosity rather than purpose. Curiosity asks less of us. It just asks us to spend time with something that interests us to see what happens next.

Phillipa Perry