How does one go about ‘leading the purposeful life’? What is the best and most effective way to do this? Although it is pretty much standard (in motivational-speaker type circles, at least!) to boldly declare that ‘a purposeless life is a wasted life’ the truth of the matter is that the so-called ‘purposeful life’ is a hoax through and through, a hoax which we would see through immediately if only we could be bothered to take the trouble to investigate it! The purposeful life is a dead end. The whole thing is ‘invented out of thin air’ – it’s a fantasy and it doesn’t go anywhere. Not only does it ‘not go anywhere’, it will collapse into a pile of dust the moment we stop pumping energy into it. The purposeful life has no life of its own, no reality of its own, so how can we say that it’s so damn meaningful?
The thing about the purposeful life is precisely that it is purposeful. We make it happen, in line with our thinking, and because our thinking is – in its essence – unconnected to anything outside of itself (because it is a signifier rather than what is being signified). Our mental pictures of the world are abstractions and this means that the activity that derives from it is always going to be incoherent. We think that what we’re doing makes sense but it doesn’t, not when we take a wider view. When we take the wider view we see that our purposeful behaviour ‘doesn’t agree with itself’ and – ultimately – this means that our rationally-informed activity always cancels itself out. When we take the wider view then what we see is that thought equals positive space. We don’t need to say any more than this.
Thought is always partial in its scope and although we might say – in defence of this instrument – that it is at least useful to this extent (useful to a partial extent, that is) what we’re missing if we say that is that the ‘parts of the picture’ that the TM can legitimately talk about are themselves ‘constructs of thought’ – they owe their existence to it. There’s no such thing as parts in the real world! The so-called ‘parts’ (or ‘classes’) have no existence of their own, existing only within the protected / virtual environment that exists within our own heads, and so what’s happening here is that thought is looping. Thought is chasing itself around and around in circles under the utterly misguided impression that it is not doing so, under the utterly misguided impression that it is exploring some kind of ‘real territory’ (rather than just its own projection).
The Purposeful Life is the life that is ‘in tune with our thinking’, therefore. It echoes our thinking (it is our thinking) and so if that is out of whack then so too will our purposes be, and the thing about this is that our thinking is always out of whack when it’s the natural world (rather than the man-made one) we’re talking about. The Designed World is merely a ‘description’ and it can never replace the actual thing. When we ‘glorify our purposes’ we glorify our thinking and our thinking is entirely duplicitous in its nature, being quite happy to take any position that suits it. It is fickle, taking one position one day and another the next whilst never acknowledging that this is what it’s doing. Instead of talking about thinking we could talk in terms of belief and say that all purposes come out of our concrete beliefs; if we didn’t have a concrete or literal belief about the world then there wouldn’t be any such thing as ‘purposefulness’. Without a non-examinable framework to operate within (without there being an ‘inviolate level of coding’) the idea of goals becomes meaningless; just as we can’t jump up in the air without solid ground under our feet to push off from, so too can we not have purposes in mind to guide our actions without there being a definite black and white picture of the world to draw on.
To lead the Purposeful Life there has to be solid ground to push off from – otherwise we just aren’t going anywhere – but the problem here is that the sort of solid ground we need to push off from just doesn’t happen to exist in the real world. This is awkward, therefore! There isn’t any purposefulness in the real world, there isn’t any possibility of there being any such thing. There aren’t any goals in the real world – no matter how extensively we might travel and explore and research, we’ll never come across this thing we call ‘a goal’. We’ll never actually find one no matter how long we search, and yet – all the same – we are being constantly being told that there’s no better thing we could be doing in life than accomplishing concrete goals. This is the ‘ultimate’, this is what it’s all about – striving bravely and determinedly to ‘realise our dreams’. This is all very well however until we realise that – just as George Carlin says – this phrase means exactly what it says. We’re chasing dreams because we’re asleep. Going all out to realise our dreams means that we’re on the run from reality (since our ‘dreams’ have precisely nothing to do with anything outside of our own perfectly sterile self-referential bubble). We are sublimely ignorant as regards anything outside of this private reality capsule – we’re orientated in exactly the other direction, we’re orientated the in the direction of bias confirmation, not bias-falsification. We have no taste for bias-falsification, and this is just another way of saying that we have no taste for the truth. The truth is outside of our control and cannot therefore be trusted.
The goals we chased so madly, so doggedly, are – when it comes down to it – nothing more than hollow self-validations. Achieving a goal makes us feel good about ourselves; this is how we prove ourselves to ourselves that we’re getting somewhere, that we are progressing in life. We’re progressing towards the fulfilment of our dreams, we’re progressing towards getting what we want and that’s ‘the ultimate’, as we have been saying. What else would we care about apart from ‘what we want’? Realizing all our goals is the ultimate way proving to ourselves that we’re ‘living our best life’, as we like to say. We’re ticking off all the milestones, we’re succeeding within the terms of the artificial framework and this is how we get rid of (or try to get rid of) the nasty feeling that actually we’re not living our best life at all and that we are in fact totally missing out in whatever it is that life is supposed to be about (whatever that might be).
This feeling (which is what we call ‘FOMO’) turns out to be rather hard to shake, no matter how much stuff we get into, no matter how many pies we might have our fingers in, and we call it a psychologically naïve observer of human behaviour might take this sense of urgency that we have not to ‘miss out on what’s going on’ as being perfectly healthy but it’s nothing of the sort – the reason we have this nasty little suspicion that we’re ‘missing out on life’ is because deep down (in the place that we keep all our repressed insights) we know that we absolutely are. The truth is that we’re missing the point entirely – the party is in full swing alright (there’s never been a party like it and there never will be) but we’re not in it. Life is ‘somewhere else’, not where we are. The drive to optimise our situation in whatever way isn’t a manifestation of health therefore, but rather it’s an indication of our willingness to deceive ourselves, our willingness to deny the truth of what’s going on.
To put it in a more familiar way, our inner impoverishment shows itself in the form of good old-fashioned greed – we’re desperate to fill the hole within us and we validate the action by which we try to do this by calling it ‘self-empowerment’. The hole in question comes about as a direct result of us personalising life (i.e., ‘taking it personally’) in the way that we do, in the way that we have just been talking about. Our way of understanding life is to see personalising stuff as being what we should be doing, as being the right and proper way of going about things. Our whole emphasis in life is this business of purposefulness – that’s how we establish a specific identity and having an identity – as we all know – is vital, is fundamental. That’s ‘the name of the game’ we say. If we don’t have a strong identity that can be recognised and respected by others (and which also tells us who we are, in case we might ever find ourselves in doubt) then this is considered by all to be the ultimate ‘fail’. We don’t get to be a person in this case, and so this is of course a failure of the worst possible kind. We haven’t ‘distinguished’ ourselves, we haven’t ‘made a name’ for ourselves…
And yet – despite the immense, colossal unshakeable conviction that the Collective (or Societal) Mind has on this point – we have it completely backwards. We have it completely ‘arse-ways’; we couldn’t have got it more wrong. ‘Personalising life’ means making it all about me and this means that I am not even remotely interested in anything that doesn’t – in my eyes – have the possibility of being of benefit or use to me. The ‘me’ that is being benefitted exists only in the dream, only in the game, not in reality however and thus – just as Alan Watts says – ‘the purposeful life misses everything’. It ‘misses everything’ because it’s all being done for this sake of ‘the player of the game’ and the game isn’t real. There isn’t any game and so there can’t be such a thing as ‘the player’. To personalize life is to turn the world into our own projection and whilst this might superficially seem to us to be beneficial (in that it flatters us) the result of us relating only to our own projections is that we become alienated from anything that is actually real, anything that can actually feed or nourish us…
