When Your Purpose Is Unclear — Clarity Is Not a Precondition for Starting

Introduction — This Post Is an Essay

Let me state the nature of this post up front. Unlike the other posts in the series, this one is not a summary of research but an essay. There is empirical research on subjects like purpose and the meaning of life too, but the claims here are not built on the back of that research; they are built as a structural argument. That is why there are almost no citations. Wherever it does not persuade you, read it as one person's point of view.

The state it deals with is this one. I do not know what I am doing this for. Everyone else seems to have a direction and I am the only one without one. Once my purpose is settled, then I will do it properly. The default strategy people pick in this state is waiting — postponing the search until things become clear. This post writes down why that strategy is structurally disadvantaged, and how moving without clarity is possible.

There are reasons waiting became the default strategy. We are trained for close to twenty years in an environment where goals are handed to us in advance. School always has a next exam, and entrance exams have clear marking criteria. The ability to solve a problem once you receive it gets built that way, but the ability to decide for yourself what the problem is does not appear in the curriculum. So standing there waiting for the next question sheet once the examiner disappears at graduation is not a personal defect but a result of the training. Only, not being a defect and being allowed to stay that way are two different statements.

1. Purpose Sits Downstream, Not Upstream

Underneath the waiting strategy lies an assumption about order: that purpose is settled first, and then you move toward that purpose. In the language of planning it is a natural order. Yet in actual life the order in which purpose gets made is mostly the reverse.

Do something long enough that you become good at it, and being good makes you useful to someone; that usefulness creates relationships and requests; and one day you look back and find you can put a name to the whole of it. That name is purpose. In other words, purpose is closer to the output of accumulation than to an input of planning. Teachers who set out certain from the start that a life of teaching children was their calling are far rarer than teachers who say they got good at teaching by doing it, and that it grew meaningful because they got good.

The illusion created by finished stories also plays a part in making the waiting strategy look plausible. Retrospectives by people who achieved something are almost always arranged as narratives that start from purpose: I dreamed of this from childhood, and so I walked this road. But a retrospective is written by someone who knows the ending. Countless accidents and wanderings and abandoned pursuits get cut in the edit, and the surviving scenes are strung retroactively onto a single line of purpose. Read a finished biography from the back to the front and it looks as though purpose came first, but for the person who lived that life from front to back, purpose was usually a name that arrived much later.

Accept this order and the meaning of having no purpose changes. It is not a defect but a status indicator saying that the accumulation has not yet piled up enough to earn a name. And the prescription changes too. Not thinking harder, but stacking up the material a name can be attached to.

2. A Compass, Not Coordinates

Still, you cannot stack up just anything, so some criterion is needed. The useful distinction here is between a goal and a direction.

A goal is a coordinate. To become something within three years, to get into a certain company. Coordinates are scored by whether you arrive, and coordinates chosen in a period of unclear purpose are mostly borrowed from other people, so arriving tends to feel empty. The problem with a borrowed coordinate shows itself at the moment of arrival. The morning after passing the exam and getting the job, the experience of what to move toward now going blank again. Coordinates are consumables that have to be sourced anew each time you reach one, and a person without a criterion of their own goes looking for someone else's coordinate every time.

A direction is different. A direction is the criterion that filters which of today's options to pick. Toward making things, toward helping people directly, toward using your body, toward explaining. That much resolution is enough.

Direction has two advantages. First, it has no concept of failure. A coordinate can be missed, but with a direction you advance as much as you walk. Second, the cost of revision is low. Changing a coordinate feels like scrapping a plan, whereas turning a direction is part of navigating. What a period of unclear purpose needs is not an accurate coordinate but a criterion that costs little when it is wrong, and that is a direction.

What a direction actually does is not a grand declaration but filtering. As a constructed example, suppose three offers land in front of someone holding the single line of going toward making things: a well-paid management job, a production job with a lot to learn, a comfortable maintenance job. Without a direction the three get compared on other people's criteria such as salary and reputation, and whichever you pick leaves a residue of unease. With a direction at least one drops out of contention, and the deliberation among what remains gets far smaller. A direction is not a device that tells you the right answer but a device that shrinks the size of the deliberation. And after a few rounds of filtering, what you have kept filtering out becomes data about you in itself.

3. Small Bets — The Craft of Moving Without Certainty

If even picking a single direction is hard, then do not pick; test. Only, the size of the test has to be controlled.

The post on decisions distinguished doors you can come back through from doors you cannot. The most common mistake in searching for a purpose is designing the search as a one-way door. Quitting the company you were at and staking everything to test a new road is romantic, but it has the same structure as gambling your entire estate on a single trial. On the other side sit small bets. Trying it for one day of a weekend, trying it as a three-month side project, talking to three people who work in that field.

The aim of a small bet is not success but information. The imagined job before you try it and the actual feel after you have tried it are almost always different, because imagination shows you the highlights of the work while reality shows you its Tuesday afternoon. Each time a bet ends we hold slightly more accurate data about ourselves. More important than what was enjoyable is what was bearable. Most of any job is its boring stretches, and the job you can keep doing for a long time is the one whose boring stretches you can bear.

One rule is enough for setting the size of a bet: decide the cap on the cost of failure in advance. In time, a few weeks to three months; in money, an amount whose loss does not shake your living; in relationships, a range that does not burn the bridge you would come back over. Inside that cap a bet can fail several times and still continue, and being able to continue matters more than a winning rate when you are searching. Conversely, thinking for longer does not increase information. A simulation in your head only rearranges what you already hold; new information comes in only at the contact surface with the actual world. Having coffee with three people who work in that field tells you more, in most cases, than three months of deliberating.

4. The Trap of Waiting for Passion

The biggest psychological obstacle to a small bet is the belief that a finished passion is hidden somewhere with your name on it. That once you find it every morning will be exciting, and that since you have not found it yet, growing attached to the work you do now is a compromise.

The trouble with this belief lies in the structure of the actual experience the word passion points at. Look closely at the passion of people absorbed in something and it is mostly not a state of love at first sight being maintained, but the result of a cycle that has been running for a long time: getting good produces enjoyment, and enjoyment calls for more investment. That is, passion is a product of accumulation rather than an object of discovery, and it lives in the same downstream as the purpose of section 1.

The reason the language of discovery is dangerous is that it ruins the interpretation of the early stretch. Anything is clumsy at first, and while you are clumsy it is not fun. The person searching for passion reads this natural blandness as a signal that this is not their road, and leaves. Step only on the entrance of every road that way and no road accumulates enough for enjoyment to arise. The trap has a structure that reinforces itself.

So how should the absence of fun be read? It is useful to distinguish two kinds. One is the absence of fun that comes from being clumsy. This gets lighter as skill accrues. If what was nothing but painful last month is occasionally interesting this month, it is not yet time to judge that work. The other is the absence of fun that stays the same even once you are good. If your skill has grown and you are being praised and yet the time spent doing the work still feels like nothing but depletion, that is closer to a signal that the grain does not match than a problem of the entrance. This distinction cannot be made from a single feeling; you have to look at the change over time. Here too is a reason records are needed.

5. A Procedure — The Three-Month Experiment Unit

Bringing the view of this post down into a procedure looks like this.

1. Write your direction as one sentence. It does not need to be correct. The most plausible hypothesis for now is enough.
2. Design one small bet in that direction. Within three months, at a size that leaves no scar if you drop it. Set the end date when you start.
3. Record one line a week. What differed from expectation, and whether the boring stretch was bearable.
4. Score it and wrap it up on the end date. Continue, turn, or fold. Folding is not a failure but an experiment whose information has been recovered. How to end well is written in the post on endings.
5. When three experiments are done, look at the data. If something repeats across the three records, that is the first material for a name.

The format of the record is free, but it is better to fix the questions. Was there anything this week I did without noticing the time pass? What did I do that nobody told me to do? What was boring but bearable, and what was hard to bear? Once answers to these three questions pile up across several experiments, at some point a pattern shows between them. It is fine for some weeks to leave the answer as nothing. A nothing is data too once recorded. Putting a name to the pattern is the next job, and there is no reason to hurry.

Where This Advice Does Not Apply

• Someone whose purpose is already vivid — rare, but they genuinely exist. In that case this post is unnecessary, and what remains is a problem of execution.
• A period when survival is urgent — searching consumes spare resources. In a period when your immediate livelihood is shaking, the priority is stability rather than experiments, and that is not a shameful priority at all.
• When a state of everything feeling meaningless goes on and on — an unclear purpose and a persisting listlessness are different problems. The latter is outside the scope of this essay, and is not a thing to handle with a structural argument.

Closing — How to Walk in Fog

A state of unclear purpose is uncomfortable, but it is not in itself a wrong state. Most people live most of their lives in it. The problem is not the fog but the decision not to walk until the fog lifts. Fog does not lift in front of someone standing still; it has lifted behind someone walking. A road reveals itself only in the manner of being recognised as a road once you look back.

So what is needed today is not the answer to your life. One sentence of direction, one three-month bet, a weekly record. Clarity comes afterwards, usually much later, as a name attached to what has accumulated.

And even if that name never arrives in the end, this procedure does not become waste. Time spent walking along a direction remains as skill and relationships and data about yourself, and those things hold up a life without the name tag of purpose. Purpose is a roof that is good to have, not a pillar whose absence brings the house down.

Self-development fundamentals series — Previous: The Structure of Being Good · Next: The Power of Small Habits