Finding your Purpose
You are reading this today only because many people lived up to theirs.
Everything around you was built by people who lived up to their life purpose whether they called it that or not. The phone in your hand exists because someone obsessed over circuits. The language you think in was shaped by people who cared enough to preserve it. You are here because your ancestors chose continuation over interruption. Purpose, in this sense, doesn’t need poetry. It is simply action sustained long enough to leave a trace.
We speak of purpose as if it were a destination, as if life is a single, grand quest and not a series of side quests stitched together by pure coincidence.And yet, without millions of people believing (often blindly) in some purpose, mankind wouldn’t be here.From the moon landing to machines now beginning to rival human intelligence.
Nearly half a million people took part in the Manhattan Project. Miners, physicists, engineers, administrators; each performing a narrow task, most believing they were contributing to world peace. What emerged from this unprecedented cooperation was the most destructive weapon ever built.
The unsettling part which history overlooks was the process and not the outcome. This was not an evil invention born of malice but a product of large-scale mobilisation, by ordinary people doing their jobs and trusting the larger story they were handed.
This conflict is ancient. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna freezes on the battlefield, paralysed by the moral weight of his actions. Krishna does not promise him a good outcome. He offers something colder and more unsettling: Act according to your dharma, without attachment to the fruits of action. The consequence, Krishna insists, is not Arjuna’s burden to carry.
In that sense, J. Robert Oppenheimer mirrors Arjuna more than we admit. He fulfilled his duty… his intellectual and national dharma. But the fruit of that action escaped him entirely. His later moral unease and resistance to nuclear escalation suggest a hard truth that maybe : Fulfilling one’s purpose does not guarantee peace, closure, or satiation.
Purpose can be executed flawlessly and still leave the soul unsettled. Duty completed does not mean meaning resolved. It’s here that I find myself tilting toward the Vedic view that places spiritual clarity above material outcomes. The most pompous purposes of man often orbit the idea of “changing the world.” What if our true purpose isn’t to reshape the world at all, but to realise that we are not of it in the way we imagine and therefore not burdened with the responsibility of redeeming it?
I oscillate between two polar archetypes: my YOLO peers and learned Hindu scholars. On the surface, they appear irreconcilable as one urges indulgence, the other restraint. But both are responding to the same observation: Impermanence of Life
The YOLO worldview calls for intensity. If everything ends, pleasure must be seized before it slips away. The present moment becomes something to consume, to extract from. Pleasure becomes philosophy. Experience becomes proof of aliveness.
The Hindu scholar reaches the same recognition and draws the opposite conclusion. If even pleasure is fleeting, then why chase what is guaranteed to dissolve? Why organise one’s life around sensations that peak and fade? Impermanence, to them, is a reason to detach.
When we chase influence as purpose, we’re basically handing our sense of meaning to other people. We’re saying: I matter if I’m acknowledged. If enough people clap, follow, approve.
But that ladder never ends. There’s always someone above you, someone bigger, someone with more reach and eventually, there’s someone who simply doesn’t believe in the whole thing at all… for whom your title, status, and symbols mean nothing.
You spend years climbing structures that exist only because everyone agrees to keep playing along. And the moment that collective belief cracks through a layoff, irrelevance or an outsider you meet on the road asking, “SVP of strategy at XYZ… what does that actually mean?…whatever you were calling purpose quietly evaporates.
What if this entire idea of purpose is a delusion the mind invents to feel anchored? Our brains are pattern-finding, meaning-seeking machines. When none is obvious, we create it. Straying off to making our own meanings and we get misled in delusion that this particular thing would quench my thirst.
Strip life down to its most primitive functions and very little remains: survival, continuation and care. Everything beyond that begins to appear increasingly manufactured A lot of what we call ambition, legacy, even purpose seems to arrive pre-shaped by this capitalist system and when u go go strive for it u actually just serve the capitalist economy who planted those ambitions, wishes in you.
Epilogue
Over time, you realise that every person that walks in your life has their own purpose. Some teach you something you didn’t know you needed to learn. Some arrive briefly and leave you lighter. Others create friction that quietly redirects you to a better place. And when that purpose is fulfilled, they walk out of your life often abruptly/quietly, without a goodbye..passing the baton to someone else whose role has just begun..
Which is why I’ve come to believe this: Purpose does matter but maybe not in the way it’s usually sold. Its value isn’t in scale, visibility or legacy. It’s in the number of lives it touches positively. In the end, it’s people that count.
I have my whole life ahead of me. I’ll probably ride the capitalist wave for a while.. chasing a few grand dreams of mine, building mass credibility, climbing the pyramid and maybe later, once that itch is scratched, I’ll revisit this and choose peace over performance.
Would recommend watching the podcast—none of Robert’s points were siphoned into this piece.
Belive in something bigger than yourself- God, Family, etc. Remember that you are someones purpose.
2026
As we begin another year, goal should not only be to have a happy new year but a larger one. Life has to expand. Higher Highs, Lower Lows. A hard truth I learn in 2025 was that you cannot fully optimise your life in a linear direction, as life happens you unlock new context, new capacity, new connections which will make pain and joy more intense. This is Life. You are still the kid you used to be, just tackling bigger waves now.
It seems we both have an encouraging message on having purpose 😃
Thanks for sharing
Interesting perspective and very encouraging.