Sometimes a Feeling Is Your Life Purpose
Having a goal for your life is a good idea. It gives structure to your days and a life purpose to frame everything you do around.
It gives you a why. And with a why, you can do almost any how.
But having a specific life purpose doesn’t work for everyone. That may surprise you since this idea is repeated ad nauseam in so many places, but it’s true: not everyone needs a specific passion to guide them. Think that might be you?
Here’s what you should have instead.
Your Heart Is the Answer
Quick: what’s the purpose of humanity?
If you answered anything other than reproducing more copies of ourselves, you aren’t thinking with an evolutionary and biological perspective.
But even though that’s obviously true scientifically, not everyone has children – and even those who do have children rarely center their entire existence around their offspring.
What humans do concern most of their daily life around is a process called homeostasis. This is the regulation of internal conditions in reaction to the external environment. But to put it simply, it’s about feeling good.
Pursuing homeostasis over a bigger goal (like having a child or pursuing a passion) can be very informative. Sometimes, our external environment is more chaotic and it’s difficult to plan for the future.
Those who suffered abuse or trauma may find themselves focused on homeostasis too. It’s not just a coping mechanism: it helps them ignore toxic cultural and social messaging around them and focus on self-care.
In essence, feeling is a good substitute for a more clearly defined life purpose for those whose life is volatile and only one’s intuition is a trustworthy guide.
How to Use Feeling as Life Purpose
If you suspect you’re the type of person whose life purpose is feeling over a specific passion, then you need to approach life differently.
Intrapersonal intelligence is a cognitive skill in which a person comprehends their innermost emotions, thoughts, and motivations. This helps you to make the right decision the first time and better relate to the external environment around you. In other words, the mechanism for your success.
It’s not that you can’t set long-term goals and orchestrate strategies, but that this future thinking shouldn’t be focused on a life purpose, but on the security of your feelings in the moment.
No, this isn’t a selfish way of living. If you suspect you don’t have a clear life purpose, then homeostasis and pursuing happiness is your goal. You wouldn’t be able to achieve anything that mattered to you otherwise.
The link between cause and effect is broken for those who should pursue feeling over life purpose. Pursuing that feeling is what repairs that broken chain.
Circumstances Do Change
Everyone is born with some sort of destiny, but our free will actions and the actions of those around us can alter that path considerably.
I don’t know what your life purpose was when you were born, but if you have the intuitive feeling you’re supposed to focus on happiness right now – you’re probably right.
You may live your entire life pursuing happiness over a clearly defined passion. That can lead you to setting an arbitrary and not existentially important goal and following it simply because it brings you joy in the moment. You might also change that arbitrary goal many times.
Some of you may even reach a point where the chaos in your environment decreases and you feel the intuitive pull to pursue a clearly defined life purpose instead. You’ll know when that happens because it’ll feel like a eureka moment or spiritual awakening.
But your heart – your intuition – is what you should be listening to right now.
Sometimes, feeling happy is morally justified over pursuing a life quest.
Tend to your joy. It will change things for you in ways you may not even realize yet.
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