where we're going, we don't need roads

the only advice about finding your purpose worth reading

In last week’s letter, I explored the idea that having purpose is the key to a youthful, vibrant human experience. It’s one thing to know intellectually, but another thing entirely to actually find your purpose and live it out daily.

I’m probably the least qualified person to tell you how to find your purpose. I’m a mess. BUT. Because of this, I’ve been a student of how to find your purpose for years at this point, carefully studying how people who seem to have found their purpose live, and what their habits are, pouring over every self-help maxim, piece of stoic philosophy, and poetry to try to nail down how exactly one finds their purpose like a professional conspiracy theorist, complete with red string, cryptic newspaper clippings, and a full archive of C-SPAN footage.

The problem with most advice about finding your purpose is that it usually suggests that your purpose is a singular state of being that you can strong-arm into submission. With the right stack of daily habits, journaling, and visualization, BAM, it will come to you.

I can confidently say, having heeded this type of terrible advice—that’s not it.

No one living their purpose has come to it this way, sitting alone at home, willing purpose to strike like a lightning bolt.

If anything, the poets get the closest:

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman was a g.

But for all of my query, there is one person whose advice actually hold water:

Boyd Varty.

You’ve likely never heard of him. He’s a lion tracker and game reserve owner turned life coach. Aptly so, because I think he’s cracked the code.

---

I briefly wrote about his book, The Lion Trackers Guide to Life, in this week’s Weekly Report. This is my second time reading this book. I mostly picked it up because I was in between books and the one I was waiting to start hadn’t arrived yet, so I wanted something I knew I could breeze through quickly in the meantime.

I had almost forgotten how important this little book was.

So, instead of me regurgitating the same random shit advice you’ve heard a million times about finding your purpose, I’m going to share some lines from the book that shook me to my core and reverberated in my bones, because there’s enough shitty advice out there and you deserve to hear something actually good for once.

---

Too much uncertainty is chaos, too little is death.

The method of trying to control finding your purpose, mapping out every little step, is not the way. We have to engage with life and let things get a little hairy from time to time. How can we truly know ourselves if we stay in the linear plane of certainty and comfort? A purposeful and meaningful life is risky business.

People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking for the feeling of being alive.

Ok, so this is a quote of a quote by Joseph Campbell, but this one gives me goosebumps and makes me feel hot. Ultimately, I don’t know that the thing we actually care about is purpose. We actually just want to feel what it means to be human. So much time for the modern human is spent numbing, hiding from a mediocre existence because we lack the courage (and proper environment) to feel our lives deeply.

Don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself.

AKA, flow. Knowing what gets you into flow states is massively important for figuring out how you should direct your time and energy.

We lose ourselves in “shoulds”… No wild animal has ever participated in a should.

Whenever I hear the word “should” alarm bells and sirens ring out in my head. “Should” is a red flag. Forget what you “should” do. “Shoulds” aren’t real. My personal life motto that I try to remind myself of often is “the rules are made up and the points don’t matter” (yes, that’s the tagline for Whose Line Is It Anyway? but it works). Meaning: the rules that state how we should live our lives were made up by someone to rig the game in their favor. You don’t have to play by their rules or even play their game.

Losing the track is not the end of the trail, but rather a space for preparation… Prepare yourself to hear the call, invite the unknown, look for the first track, tune into the instrument of the body, and learn to see the track amidst many things that bring you to life.

You will feel lost. Purpose is not a destination, but a journey. You will lose yourself and rediscover yourself over and over and over again. Don’t panic. As Varty also says, “Be invested in a discovery rather than an outcome”. Everything is a process, there is no finished product. The expectation of a happily ever after will fuck you up.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know exactly how to get there.

This is one of my favorites and I think maybe the most poignant point of all. I’ve heard Varty in a podcast (I think this one?) talk about taking “purposeful action towards an unknown purpose”. It’s helpful for me to think of purpose as a verb, rather than a a noun. Don’t worry about “finding your purpose” in a way where you can label and put a bow on it. Just focus on doing things on purpose and you’ll get somewhere worth getting.

Let go of where you think you’re going, it’s preventing you from getting to somewhere better.

The path of not here

One of my favorite concepts from the book: doing the wrong thing is just as important as doing the right thing. It’s all apart of the path.

You can’t skip past creating to the creation.

I often find myself with grand visions of the life I want. But turning grand visions into small, practical actions that are immediately accessible to me is daunting. It all seems so impossibly far off. It’s hard, as Varty writes, to “trust that doing enough of what needed to be done today [will], with time, render a path and outcome that could be great”. Having goals and vision is great, but again, you have to hold them loosely, or they will keep to paralyzed.

We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life.

This one is kind of a curve ball, but it’s such a sincere truth.

So many people ignore that death is an inevitable part of life. You don’t get to opt-out. As we’ve divorced ourselves from nature, we’ve divorce ourselves from the circle of life. I’ve written about this before, but I think having some sort of spiritual belief, one that makes you confront and come to terms with your mortality, is a step not worth skipping.

You can’t think your way to a calling. You have to learn how your body speaks. You have to learn how you know what you know. You have to follow the inner tracks of your feelings, sensations, and instincts, the integrity and truth that are deeper than the ideas about what you should do.

This goes back to my findings throughout all of my study of the self-help arts—stop trying to intellectualize purpose. You’re thinking about it way to hard. Again, we’re not looking for the meaning of life, we’re looking for the feeling of being alive. Learn to feel. There are a lot of paths there—breathwork and meditation, just to name a few. I know that’s not what you want to hear about you have to divorce yourself from all of the stimulus and mechanisms you use to numb yourself and cut yourself off from feeling.

Track what makes you feel good and bring more of it into your life. Notice what makes you feel lousy and do less of it.

Duh.