How to find the Purpose of Life?
Firstly, it’s completely okay to feel the need to ask this question. Believe me, everyone I know has asked this question to themselves and others at some point in their life and often multiple times.
Lately, I also have been asking this question a lot to myself and one of the primary reasons I started doing it was because of the realisations I had after coming across Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
From Sapiens, I learned that we homo sapiens are like any other species of animals.
Apart from making copies of our DNAs, our lives don’t have any inherent purpose, this may sound pretty negative to some readers, but I looked at this realisation with optimism.
I feel when you combine optimism with this realisation, you will discover that since there is no inherent purpose to life, YOU get to find one for yourself!
I wanted to learn more about how other people found their meaning for life so I got to know about this book called Man’s Search For Meaning, it’s written by a Holocaust survivor who was also an Austrian neurologist and a respected psychiatrist well known in the psychiatric community as the founder of Logotherapy.
Viktor talks about his experience in the concentration camps, how SS (Nazi Police) treated them, and how many people used to die every day just because of starvation.
And even in such conditions, some people were able to have hope just because they had found their purpose and were living for it, some found it in the hope of meeting their family one day, some, like Viktor himself, found it in sharing their experience and learnings with the world.
According to Viktor, the purpose of life can be found in one’s work, love and even in one’s challenges, sufferings and misfortunes.
For love, this quote by Viktor says it all.
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.
For suffering, Viktor himself is a great example, he gave his suffering at concentration camps an objective and studied the effects of suffering and later wrote a best seller book which to date helps people find meaning in their life.
For work, we all have read/heard/seen how one can do wonderous things by finding purpose in one’s work, one of the most relatable examples today is of Elon Musks.
He, through his work, has significantly reduced the cost of space travel and has shown to the world that electric mobility a viable option for millions, his efforts have led to revolutions in all the industries he touched.
How can you find your life’s purpose?
I would suggest you sit back and take time to think about the purpose of your life along the lines of this article and maybe try to answer these five questions.
- Who are you? (I am Udit Chugh)
- What do you do? (I am one of the co-founders of a pet supplies & services startup)
- Who you do it for? (I do it for stray animals, pets & pet parents)
- What those people want and need? (Pet parents want to give their pet’s a beautiful life while also managing their individual lives)
- How do they change as a result? (I allow them to spend more time with their pet by taking away the hard things out of the pet parenting experience)
As you may see, three of these five questions point outwards, and even Viktor mentioned in the book that often people find the purpose of their life in serving others, be it via their work or by love.
Viktor says
No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.
So your search for purpose is going to be yours but I hope this article guides you a tad bit in your search, because after all
He who has a why to live for can bear anyhow — Friedrich Nietzsche
This post was originally published on my Medium blog, going forward I will be using this medium (pun intended) to share my ideas.