Often, I would think, what is the purpose of life. For years, I have been hearing or reading from different people, pseudo-philosophers, motivational-speakers, self-help books, etc. that we need to identify our purpose. People say, “my purpose is to visit all the countries in the world”, “my purpose is to become rich”, “my purpose is to become a musician”, etc etc. I spent years wondering what my purpose was. This led to frustration as I couldn’t find any such thing as a purpose.
One day, I asked myself a simple question: If everyone knew their exact purpose of life, wouldn’t it make us robots? If everyone was born with an itinerary of their life, that would just kill the excitement of life and make human mind rigid. Humans would function like machine towards their purpose with no creativity. That’s when it struck me: No, there is no such thing as purpose of life. Even if there were, it wouldn’t be possible for human mind to fathom “real” purpose.
The people who always say they have found their purpose have just created a goal in their mind and called it “the purpose”. There is nothing wrong in setting goals but making that goal your superficial purpose in your mind and becoming a slave to it by tying your happiness and actions to it, makes you nothing short of a machine. Once you become emotionally attached to it, it’s good if you achieve it, but you resent it if you don’t achieve. And you don’t always get what you want in life.
Same goes with (something people call it) a “bucket list”. I want to go this place, do that, wear those, meet him/her, bla bla bla. Same thing happens, you tie-up your happiness to these superficial items. If all the items are ticked in the list, well and good, but if you don’t tick all the items in that list, it drives you insane and makes you disappointed, because you led your mind to believe that if you do all those things in the list, it will make you happy. Let’s be honest very few can complete the list during their lifetime.
So, why create a superficial purpose for yourself or create a bucket list and become its slave. Just enjoy the life with open mind and freedom, grab every opportunity to be happy, to enjoy, to be grateful irrespective of whether you are visiting Italy or Spain (which is in your bucket list). Maybe that is the entire purpose of life, “to experience it”.
Remember, life is too short to handover the remote-control of your happiness to a purpose or to a few items in your bucket-list.