Living With Purpose in a World Without One
Congratulations! You're reading the first ever post in the Lost Art Blog. Wooooo!!
In our modern world of endless possibility and infinite data, most humans live in a blur of multimedia click bait -- like a pinball, caroming from link to link hoping to rack up points inside a digital box.
Our experiences with the internet carve out a sort of virtual identity for us that's loosely based on our choices but mostly dictated by search-engine optimization, marketing traps, and wormholes that pop open in the internet universe and suck us in. And this aimlessness becomes a sort of guiding principle as we clamber through life (like a cat chasing a flashlight). And living with any kind of sustainable purpose is unfortunately becoming a lost art.
So how do we find purpose? How do we carve our own path?
Well....I don't know. : ) But I think discovering your purpose is a lifelong process, and that process of always becoming becomes a sort of purpose. It teaches you patience and empathy and humility along the way. It may not be as instantly fulfilling as clicking the next link, but it teaches you ownership of your emotions and to be content with your own internal universe instead of expecting the outside world to bend to your every whim and make you happy. There is a lot of entitlement and instant gratification within this culture we're creating for ourselves. And it sucks. Too many people live their whole lives trapped in a chair watching some bad magic show, and we're all too satisfied fueling up moment to moment with nothing but puffs of air. We need to take the time to unravel this mystery of life and discover what it means to be human...to be your own unique self. We were born for more than this bucket of worms. We were born to be better. We were born for a purpose.
This world will break your heart. But putting it back together gives you hope, and leveraging that hope to become honest, vulnerable, and resolute even to the brink of another heartbreak -- that's real purpose and real strength.
It takes the openness to discover your passion, the focus to pursue it, and the perseverance to fight for it. And that is truly a lost art.
