Purpose Filled Life/Purpose Filled Days
Our natural impulse is to strive for a happy life. Even so, many people spend much of their life being unhappy. Stuck in jobs they dislike, relationships they resent, holding grudges that weigh them down, and swept up in a life course they never expected.
Sometimes these circumstances lead to anxiety and depression.
If you talk with a therapist, you’ll likely hear that these folks need to learn better coping skills, rid themselves of destructive and false beliefs, or take some form of medication.
None of that is bad advice. In fact, I’ve given that same advice many times.
But this ignores a powerful and often overlooked factor that can transform your life: where you choose to focus your search for happiness. The direction of your attention—what you prioritize and pursue—plays a crucial role in shaping your overall well-being.
Let me provide an analogy that will help clarify. If a fisherman’s goal is to catch a blue marlin, and he focuses his pursuit of this goal by fishing in a lake, he is bound to be forever frustrated.
On the other hand if he directs his efforts on fishing in the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian Oceans, his chances of success increase dramatically. But this will be a more difficult undertaking. It will require time away from family, work, and home, and a significant amount of expense.
Many of us focus on building a happy life by pursuing activities that provide pleasure. This might be making more money, buying a nicer home, a better car, a good meal, alcohol, sex, binge watching Netflix, sleeping in and any number of other pleasures.
There is nothing wrong with any of these pursuits. But they don’t deliver what you deeply desire. They don’t result in a sense of happiness that is ‘sticky’ – happiness that stays with you despite the ups and downs of life.
Sticky happiness comes from pursuing a meaningful life - one with purpose.
Depression, Anxiety And The Purpose Driven Life
If someone is depressed or anxious, they can often find relief by pursuing pleasure. Not a bad idea, but it has some extreme limitations.
The positive feelings that pleasure provides are usually brief. Moreover, in the course of time, you need to increase the frequency with which you turn to pleasure in order to get the same bump in mood. Or you will need to increase the magnitude of the pleasure you are seeking.
For example, if retail shopping lifts your mood, then the 100 dollars you spent to get that bump will later require a 200 dollar purchase. Similar to using drugs. The small dose that initially gave you a high no longer does the job. Now you need a larger dose.
More importantly, no matter how often you turn to pleasure, it fails to provide the sort of deeply rooted happiness you crave.
Pleasure is easy to obtain and the impact immediate.
A meaningful life guided by purpose is difficult to pursue and the impact takes longer to achieve.
Despite the differences between the two, they are not mutually exclusive. You don’t need to choose one over the other. Life can be filled with both immediate pleasures and a sense of purpose.
When such a balance is skillfully struck, depression and anxiety attenuate; they may not disappear, but they become less important. No longer do they take center stage.
Another analogy may help. If you have a flower bed and spend most of your time pulling weeds, your garden becomes a source of toil and a chore. But if you spend the majority of your time tending to the flowers, amending the soil, and watering the plants, your garden will become a lavish source of healthy flowering plants. Fewer weeds will have a chance to grow among that abundance, and those that do crop up will appear less consequential.
What Holds You Back?
The pursuit of a purpose-filled life is challenging. The rewards are not immediate; the path forward is littered with obstacles. Success is uncertain.
These difficulties are enough to make many men and women settle for a comfortable life punctuated by simple pleasures.
Added to this is the problem of determining one’s purpose. It can seem like a vague goal, something containing more mist than substance.
To push through this obstacle I suggest you begin by considering two points. One, that a ‘life purpose’ is never to simply help yourself. It invariably focuses on helping others. Two, that the pursuit of that purpose most often requires using some talent or interest you already possess.
The inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk, had a talent for research and medicine. Madame Curie advanced the science of radiation because she had a keen analytical mind. Albert Schweitzer was a musician, physician, and theologian who used each of these talents to fund and build a hospital in Africa.
Identify your passions and talents, and you will be well on your way to discovering ways to use them in the pursuit of a purpose-driven life.
Once you begin down this path, accept the hardships that follow. Fully using one’s abilities involves sacrifice.
For example, even those born with a wellspring of musical talent need to devote thousands of hours of practice to master their craft.
Those hours require discipline, time away from friends, family, and pleasurable activities.
But eventually, these efforts result in the full expression of the musician’s innate abilities. The creation of sublime music that stirs and inspires others.
Effort directed at achieving meaningful goals leads to deeper and longer-lasting happiness than pleasure-directed behavior focused on immediate gratification.
This, in turn, provides a bulwark against depression and anxiety. It does not prevent these emotions, but it makes them less important and often less intense.
Conclusion
Not all happiness is the same: happiness that comes from immediate pleasure is short-lived, while happiness rooted in purpose and meaning becomes lasting and deeply ingrained.
When the foundation of your happiness is built on a purpose-driven life, the experience of anxiety and depression is softened, and their ability to define you is attenuated.
To experience deep and lasting happiness, it’s important to focus on what brings meaning and purpose to your life. This doesn’t mean you have to give up enjoying immediate pleasures, but it does mean seeing them differently. Rather than making quick pleasures the main goal, let them serve as highlights—like punctuation marks in a well-written story—that enhance and emphasize the bigger themes of your life’s purpose.
