Life Purpose
Introduction
A life purpose isn’t always necessarily about the job that you want. It can also be exactly what you want to accomplish in life, be it have a family, go on a backpacking trip across Europe, or just make people smile whenever you can.
Everyone’s purpose in life is different. Again, it doesn’t have to do with your job at all; you might simply get whatever job is easiest or makes the most money, so that you can pursue whatever it is that you really like. If you want to be a singer, for instance, that’s not necessarily a job, at least not if you aren’t a successful singer. You could get gigs at local clubs, you could record your own album and sell it on iTunes and through other venues, but you probably want a day job just to make sure you aren’t completely broke.
Challenges You Might Face With Your Life Purpose
Assuming you know what you want your purpose in life to be, there will likely be obstacles to accomplishing it. Taking the example of wanting to be a singer, for instance, you’ll find that it’s not really a practical path. People always want to be entertained, but unless you have a lot of connections, you probably won’t end up reaching a lot of people. You need to work towards your goal, because most people don’t go through life being able to do whatever they want.
If your purpose in life is something simpler, like another above example of making people smile whenever you can, you can also face challenges, though. You won’t always be in the best of moods, after all, so if you go out and talk to someone, you won’t always be inclined to make their day bright. In these types of cases, your purpose in life depends entirely on other people, even though making other people happy in turn makes you happy. You might end up getting worn out, though, and then you can’t accomplish your goal.
On the other hand, people’s goals in life can change as well. If your big goal changes and you suddenly want to do something completely different, it can be hard to make that transition, especially if you’ve been working hard towards that first goal. This can also discourage you from wanting to change your mind, and so you might get stuck doing something that you no longer enjoy.
Family and Life Purpose
No matter how big or small your life purpose is you should always have people around you who are supportive of you. If someone thinks it’s a waste of time to want to make people smile as much as possible, you might start feeling bad about yourself. If you’re saving up money bit by bit so that you can go on that backpacking trip to Europe that you’ve been wanting to do your entire life and your significant other tells you that you should put your money towards things that they think are more worth your time, it’s going to be hard to look forward to it when you’re close to your goal.
Of course, you can’t choose your family; you’re pretty much stuck with them. So if they aren’t supportive, it’s not as if you can just replace them with some other people who are going to root for you as you work for your goals. If you find that your family isn’t supportive, however, you can turn to friends; your life goal is yours alone, after all, so you shouldn’t be obligated to try to justify yourself to people who aren’t going to understand that. You can have a perfectly healthy relationship with family members without going into too much detail about what it is you’re hoping to accomplish lately.
Therapy and Life Purpose
General counseling can help you along with your life purpose. Even if you know what it is, talking to a professional can help you figure out what you want to do with it and when, so that you have a clear goal in mind when it comes to that life purpose. They also probably have more connections than you, so if it’s something tangible, they can give you phone numbers and other contact information of people they think would be interested into talking to you and helping you out.
If you aren’t sure what your purpose in life is, it can also help to talk to a therapist so that you can sort it out. You’re paying them to pay attention to you, after all, and so they might be able to catch something about you that even you didn’t notice. You very may well have some kind of purpose or goal in life that you never even knew about, because it’s something you do every day or it just comes natural to you so you didn’t think about it in that context.
Help Us Improve This Article
Did you find an inaccuracy? We work hard to provide accurate and scientifically reliable information. If you have found an error of any kind, please let us know by sending an email to contact@theravive.com, please reference the article title and the issue you found.
Share Therapedia With Others