What If You Don’t Have a World-Changing, Heart-Racing, Life-Defining Purpose?
Purpose follows fulfillment and presence. Not the other way around.
That’s the question I recently tackled in a piece of audio content I wrote and recorded for London’s Shelf Help digital book club. The audio is exclusive to the book club, but Shelf Help has agreed to make available the written version, portions of which are excerpted and adapted from Reframe the Day. Here it is, as recorded in-studio (i.e., in a closet) in early July. Be sure to check out Shelf Help’s Reframe the Day giveaway on Instagram!
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Hi Shelf Help, Adam M. Lowenstein here—I’m the author of the new book, Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time. Today, I’m going to explore the topic of purpose. More specifically, I’ll try to answer the question: What if you don’t have a world-changing, heart-racing, life-defining purpose?
Find your calling.
Follow your passion.
Seek your purpose.
Change the world.
You’ve heard mantras like these. You’ve probably watched movies and listened to podcasts and read books about them.
For the most part, these slogans are great. They inspire us. They motivate us. They get us moving. They fire us up.
Here’s the thing, though: Not all of us have a single, life-defining passion smoldering within us. Not all of us have a “true calling” that we want to devote our lives to. Not all of us are going to quote-unquote “change the world,” at least not in the tech disruptor, TED-talk thought leader, social media influencer, chief executive, individual sense.
Kind of a downer, huh?
Actually, I don’t think it is. And I’ll tell you why, but let me start with a bit of context first.
I’m speaking to you now because I’m the author of Reframe the Day, a book in which I share ten practices that have helped me build more fulfilling days.
These are practices like cultivating awareness through mindfulness meditation.
Carving out moments of stillness throughout the day to process my thoughts.
Consuming more meaningful content.
Reflecting on death and mortality.
Sitting with—rather than acting on—the uncomfortable feeling of FOMO, the fear of missing out.
I don’t do all of these things every day. And when I do, I don’t do them perfectly. Not even close. That’s why I call them practices, not prescriptions. Not solutions.
But when I do manage to follow these practices, I find my days more fulfilled. I find myself more present, more content. Not radically so—but still meaningfully so. Sustainably so.
Over the past decade, my journey has taken me from the halls of the United States Congress, where I worked as a legislative aide and speechwriter for much of the first eight years of my professional career, to the UK, which I’ve called home for close to three years now.
I convey the ideas and practices in my book, Reframe the Day, through the lens of this journey. But there’s a part of my journey that I don’t cover in the book—at least not explicitly. That’s the part I’m sharing with you now.
Like many millennials, I grew up with a vague understanding that I—like most members of my generation—would find a way to realize my dreams, while getting paid for my passion, while ultimately changing the world.
Find your calling.
Follow your passion.
Seek your purpose.
Change the world.
What exactly did mantras like these mean to me?
Honestly, I’m not sure I ever really stopped to think about it because I was sure that as long as I did the right things—worked hard in school, built the right network, honed my personal brand, kept accomplishing and achieving and striving—as long as I did these things, I’d eventually find my purpose in life and change the world.
I was a young, idealistic, and progressive political staffer who found himself in Washington, DC at the end of Barack Obama’s first year in office. So, of course I assumed that a purpose-driven, world-changing life would follow.
It wasn’t until I left Capitol Hill and moved with my partner to the UK a few years ago that I began confronting some more fundamental questions. More accurately, it wasn’t until I left government and politics and entered the corporate world that I began confronting these questions.
For many of us, our job, our career, our work—it’s our identity. A lot of us don’t even try to pretend otherwise. I mean, when I lived in Washington, I tried to train myself not to ask people I’d just met, “So, what do you do?” As if their work identity is their actual identity. As if what they get paid to do is who they are.
The thing is, when you work in politics, that’s especially true. Your purpose is built in. You don’t really even need to think about it.
All those long hours you work for low pay? All those speeches and talking points you write, all those bills you draft, all those committee hearings you prepare for, all those meetings with associations and advocacy groups you take, all those networking coffees you organize, all that time responding to constituent letters and knocking on doors, all those late nights working on statements and tweets responding to a national tragedy or crisis?
When you work in politics, it feels like all of this stuff is done for something you believe in. Your country. Your state. Your political party. The people your boss represents. A cause that matters to you. Your beliefs. Your values. Your principles.
There’s plenty of ego and personal ambition and power-seeking and wanting to be in the room where it happens there too, of course.
But, at the end of the day, you can confidently tell yourself that you’re in politics to serve other people. And for the most part, you’ll be right. For most people, that’s an honest assessment.
The point is that, working in politics, the purpose of my work—and thus my life—was never something I really had to think about. I always knew why I was doing what I was doing.
That’s partly why I felt so lost when I entered the corporate world in the fall of 2017. It wasn’t just the acronyms and the buzzwords—all the aligning and synergizing and disrupting and moving the needle that I was now expected to do.
It was deeper than that. Could it really be that my purpose was only to make my employer more money—and that my purpose for doing that was just to make me more money?
For the first time in my professional life, I wasn’t working in government or politics, and that meant that some service-oriented purpose was no longer built into my day-to-day experience. The conviction and self-assurance that comes from believing in and working toward a social cause was no longer part of my job description.
Sure, my new corporate job had its own job description, but service was not an explicit part of it. Fighting for other people wasn’t part of it. Struggling for justice wasn’t part of it.
And, to be honest, it left me feeling lost. I no longer had an external force—like the job description of working in the United States Senate—telling me that my work mattered. Even though plenty of the work I did on Capitol Hill did not matter at all, simply being there—in the building, in the fight—seemed to be enough.
After I’d left, the more I tried to find a new external anchor like the one I’d had in politics, the more I began to realize just how much my sense of self had been caught up in my identity as a political staffer. I never had to look hard inside to figure out my purpose because some entity on the outside had already taken care of it for me.
I’m not alone in defining myself by external circumstances, in building my sense of self on things beyond my control.
Many of us rely on our job or our side-hustle or our employer or our CV to define who we are. But the point I’m making here is even broader than that.
Sure, we might be waiting for—or striving for—the next promotion or career opportunity.
But we might simply be waiting for-or striving for—something more intangible, like a true calling. Like an undiscovered passion. Like a personal mission that will empower us to change the world.
And, look, if you have a personal mission, or an undiscovered passion, or a true calling—if such a thing exists for you—by all means, go after it. I hope we’re all lucky enough to find something we love to do and the time and resources to do it.
But the very expectation that within each one of us is an invigorating, world-changing passion, waiting to be discovered and unlocked—and the very expectation that what makes a person successful is stopping at nothing to pursue that passion—these expectations are precisely what have driven so many of us into lives defined by constant busyness, constant striving, constant restlessness, a constant obsession with achieving so we can get on to “what’s next.”
If we’re striving for the perfect job—and if we’re hanging our happiness and self-worth on achieving it—we’re leaving our happiness and self-worth at the mercy of factors outside of our control.
If we’re waiting for our true purpose to reveal itself, we absolve ourselves of having to find joy or meaning in the circumstances in front of us right now.
If we’re sure that fulfillment awaits us once our personal passion has been unlocked—and only once our personal passion has been unlocked—we forfeit the possibility of finding contentment right now, in this moment.
If we’re convinced that we’ve found our one passion or career path and that nothing else matters, that conviction can easily feed the illusion of action and forward progress—even if we’re not actually doing anything.
If we’re certain that we can only contribute to the world by starting a global NGO, or winning election to high political office, or using every waking moment to volunteer, we’ll miss all the little opportunities to do a little bit of good that are right here, right in front of us, right now.
Now, don’t get me wrong: changing the world isn’t a bad thing. Finding passion and purpose isn’t a bad thing. The world needs a lot of changing, and we can always use more passionate, purpose-driven people.
But the expectation that we must all spend our lives changing the world and pursuing our passion—it’s a dangerously addictive notion. If we take this world-changing call-to-arms too far, we can easily find ourselves disheartened, burned out, exhausted, and cynical. That doesn’t help anyone.
In his book, In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche observes, “People everywhere try so hard to make the world better. Their intentions are admirable, yet they seek to change everything but themselves. To make yourself a better person is to make the world a better place.”
No single person can solve all of the world’s challenges. Most of us will never change the world the way society tells us we’re supposed to. And that’s ok.
Quite a few of us will never be fortunate enough to stumble across a single passion or purpose that defines our life. And that’s ok, too.
But, you might be thinking, if we’re not striving to find and live our purpose—if we’re not trying single-handedly to fix the world—how can we live a life of meaning? How can we serve others? How can we add value to the world?
Consider the simple suggestion of Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, who has spent decades studying how stress impacts our bodies and minds. In his book with a great title, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky writes, “In a world of stressful lack of control, an amazing source of control we all have is the ability to make the world a better place, one act at a time.”
So, what can you do?
No matter what your work is, you can choose to reframe that work as a craft, rather than a series of burdensome obligations, so you find more meaning and fulfillment in what’s in front of you right now.
You can be more intentional about spending time with the people you love and giving your attention to activities you actually enjoy, instead of saving these “want-to-dos” as rewards for completing some obligation or checking some task off your to-do list.
You can build an awareness practice that helps you recognize the hurricane of thoughts, emotions, and impulses that are bombarding your mind at any given time.
You can carve out moments of stillness that help you make some sense of the world.
You can fight FOMO, that insidious fear of missing out, which can easily give you the false impression that everyone else is following their purpose and changing the world, and you’re the only one who isn’t.
You can remind yourself that there isn’t a single life mapped out for you if only you open the right door.
You can trust that your life could go in an infinite number of directions, and that while most of what leads to door A instead of door B is beyond your control, you can probably find some meaning and fulfillment through either one.
You can choose to see your future not as a fixed plan but rather as a broad, ever-changing trajectory, a perspective that allows you to recognize, with some humility, that you might sometimes be wrong, or that you might not know yourself as well as you thought, or that you might change.
You can devote some time to personal development and self-improvement not just to better your own individual life, but because these practices are tools to equip you for our collective struggle. Tools to give you the awareness, the perspective, the time, the attention, the focus, and the mental energy to step up when the moment calls for it.
To know you have the time and emotional capacity to drop everything to take care of a family member. To show up for a friend who’s hurting. To knock on doors for a cause or candidate. To join and contribute to a mutual aid network. To protest, to march, to stand in solidarity.
To use that privilege that we have—of investing in personal development and self-improvement—for something other than our own pleasure or well-being.
So many of us are taught and internalize the idea that happiness follows passion, that if we find our purpose, only then will we be fulfilled and content.
But what if we have that backwards? What if we focus instead on finding meaning and fulfillment in this moment, right here, right now?
The late New York Times journalist David Carr once said that, “Working on your grand plan is like shoveling snow that hasn’t fallen yet. Just do the next right thing.”
If we can do that—if we can just do the next right thing, over and over and over again—we might just find that our sense of purpose will follow.
So, seek your purpose—by focusing intently on whatever you have to do today, no matter how mundane it may feel.
Find your calling—by prioritizing one thing you can do today to make today more fulfilling.
Follow your passion—by making more time for the people and activities that matter most to you.
Change the world—by showing up and being present for the people around you.
Purpose follows fulfillment. Purpose follows presence. Not the other way around.