On Searching for Purpose

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

From the surface, this common question towards children seems innocuous, but it bleeds with cultural illusion. This question is veiled with curiosity, but the undercurrent is insidious. Instead of asking a child about joy, love, happiness, hobbies, it really asks, "What role would you reduce yourself into? What singular shape will you force your selfhood into?"

The child hears joy and feels wonder, who wouldn't want to be a heroic firefighter or vet?

But, the adult hears a category. A function. A legible unit. In this, they comfortably reduce a small soul into something palatable. So, the child learns: to become something is to be praised. To have purpose is to be celebrated and witnessed.

Indeed, we revere the act of becoming.

"I want to be a millionaire by 35."

"I want to be a neurosurgeon."

"I want to be a senior engineer by 25."

"I want to be a successful Youtuber."

But we must ask: do they truly want to become something?

Or do they simply bleed for purpose?

For the tethered, for the human, to live without purpose is horrifying. So, we chase achievement. Milestones. Performance. We chase titles like a suffocating man gasps for air, hoping that they will breathe dignified purpose into our existence. This is the modern act of becoming something, to become worthy of witness. Of celebration. Of love.

Have you seen the way most "successful", wealthy individuals treat service workers?

They do not witness the suffocating soul in front of them. They witness a role, a function, something less than their own becoming. Thus, something less than them. A soul reduced. For what?

Although horrifying, it is not the pursuit of purpose that deforms us. Rather, the belief that to be seen requires the becoming of more than others. In this bed of illusion they make, they reduce their own soul into something impersonal. How else could you measure the value of two individuals?

It requires the desecration of grace.

The reduction of one's humanity masked under collective virtue. Self-imposed, comforting affliction. Anesthetic to the vertigo of unbecoming, the act of not becoming something.

The lion of a life without clear purpose roars to the timid. Disorientating. Pure, unhinged vertigo. To sit in the cathedral of nothing inspires dread.

In the release of the self to this cathedral, one unbecomes. How miraculous this technique of the lion is: in this unbecoming, in this emptying of self, a space clears. It is a total emptying of the gasping for purpose. This is the site of grace. In not becoming something, one becomes something distinct: wildly, unmistakably alive.