The Prison of Purpose

From Startup to Nowehere

Everything must have a reason, right? Everything must have a place, a position, an explanation? This is how something gets valued, right?

Every time I’ve tried living by that, I would often fail to achieve my goals. My ideas would fall apart on execution. I would question my self-worth.

There’s a line from a TV show that always used to get to me. A cleric tells a main character, “It might be interesting to explore ‘useless’ for a while — see how it feels.”

Perdana Botalical Garden | Kuala Lumpur...

I always pushed back on this because it did not comport with what I believed about myself or the world. And this is where my prison began to take shape.

Purpose is self-imposed.

Purpose is a wonderful drug.

And, like many wonderful drugs, if you don’t learn to control your use of it, addiction can easily set in. Modern heroin addiction often begins with a legal prescription.

I first tasted what I consider “true purpose” in Afghanistan. Donning armor, slinging a rifle over my shoulder, loading up on trucks, and going outside the wire gave you a real sense of purpose. You felt the literal weight of your situation. Things were clear, more “black and white” as they say.

But were they, really? Existential dangers (meaning things in the world that can kill you) give us a pass to forget about our lives and ourselves as people.

They enable us to keep our minds on the surface, ever avoidant to the subtle things in life we don’t want to deal with. When I constantly lived on the edge, I was able to conveniently ignore anything and everything.

People use the drug of purpose for all sorts of reasons. But we all tell ourselves the same story — purpose is important! Purpose can be insidious because this is true: purpose is, indeed, important.

If you’re doing something high stakes, those high stakes can help ground you, especially when the present makes us anxious.

When we lose our ability to quiet the mind and sit with ourselves, we then start looking for that feeling of purpose everywhere we go, and with everything we do, just to distract us from the present.

What’s wrong with that?

In this context, we’re often not using purpose to achieve the goal of said purpose. Rather, we use purpose as an excuse to distract us from ourselves, our feelings, our families, friends, other responsibilities.

Purpose is a great excuse. And in this way, purpose becomes our prison. We also become incapable, or unwilling, to act without it. Even when you need to.

Balance is True Freedom

My core belief is that we should all live with a sense of general purpose. We need an intention. But we often take it way too far.

Purpose becomes an obsession.

It’s when we lose the ability to do things without purpose (sometimes this is necessary) that we run into problems.

When’s the last time you couldn’t focus on the moment because you were trying to plan your afternoon? Or couldn’t be fully present with your spouse or children because you were thinking about work? Or doing work?

In our constant worship of public personas, we’ve bought into a good idea, that purpose is important, but we’ve done so completely without balance.

Sometimes, the things you do won’t be purposeful. That’s okay.

Sometimes, you need to do things that seemingly have no purpose. That’s okay.

In reality, “purpose” comes from our ego — our desire to be important. To be recognized. To be acknowledged. To feel special, above others, unique. We’re doing things with purpose, we tell ourselves, not like those other mindless people.

This is the dark side of purpose.

The Antidote: Practicing Uselessness

Yes, indeed. Like that cleric on TV said, exploring “useless” is, in fact, an interesting and worthy endeavor.

How do we explore being “useless?”

This is a different practice for everyone. The best I can articulate practicing uselessness is to take something you believe to be a waste of time, and do. But do it without complaining. Without a peep, a defense, or an explanation is best. Let them think you’re crazy. (Who’s them? Idk.)

It’s amusing that nearly everything I’ve done in the pursuit of uselessness has eventually shown itself to be incredibly useful. I could never see the point in chopping vegetables myself when I could buy them pre-chopped for the same price (or even cheaper when frozen).

Over time, I began to discover how wrong I was. Chopping vegetables myself made me connect to the food that I was eating. It helped me to enjoy what I ate more. It helped me to also eat more vegetables.

But this isn’t my “useless” activity anymore. Because now, it has purpose. So I go to something else. (Currently, it’s folding socks and t-shirts.)

My old self would scream “but think of all the things you could be doing instead!”

That guy (my old self) couldn’t sit still and quiet by himself for more than ten seconds without losing it. The further I get from him, the more I realize that he was my worst jailer. And that jailer always wanted “purpose.”

In truth, ego disguises itself with purpose. So it isn’t truly purpose, it’s pride. It isn’t truly purpose, it’s our own self-importance. So long as we believe everything must have purpose, we will always be prisoners to our lesser selves.

Thus the key in practicing uselessness is that we free ourselves from our ego by denying its lies.

Making the effort to become useless ended up being one of the most useful things in my life.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Who knew?