What if you dedicated yourself to becoming enlightened as quickly as possible for the benefit of all beings?
Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
151–160 of 239 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#152I talked to a therapist about this once and he told me to volunteer or have kids. Haven't talked to a therapist again since those were dumb suggestions. Settled into just enjoying my life and building for the future. Work out, have a dog, have a partner, build cool things. No more existential dread about purpose.
From my experience, volunteering directly helping people has been highly rewarding.
Ideally, find somewhere you can volunteer the specific skills or interests you have to help people who otherwise wouldn't benefit from what you can bring to the table.
Ideally, it would also be physically active and interfacing directly with others in some way. (And not too closely related to what you do for your day job.)
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#153Try serve several kinds of people in various kinds of services.
The one you like most is your purpose.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#154If you make your purpose helping others find and fulfill their purpose, get through their sorrows, and find joy in their lives, you will have a life with very few regrets and plenty of motivation.
And in that endeavor, you will find your unique purpose. That is, what talents, passions, and resources you have that best enable you to live a life of service and love to those around you.
Regardless of circumstance there is _always_ something we can do for one another.
Full disclosure: I am a Christian and that greatly informs my values and worldview.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#155This is going to be downvoted on HN..
We are religious being. Our religion is what connect us together and what made our society possible.
Disconnecting of religious leave us aimless, meaningless. You become materialist, nihilist.
Some will chase money or success and will keep them going for a while, but that’s not a good goal. You might reach your FU money and then realise that after a while you are still aimless and fun isn’t fun anymore.
So my atheist understanding of our ’God’ is that our goal should always be truth and love.
Aim toward the best thing you can toward truth and love and see where it lead. Money can be useful, is needed to move forward but it’s not the goal in itself. The same is true of compassion, it sound good and is important, but can never take the place of truth (the current social justice propaganda is a good example)
These things are called "false idols" thing we chase to our own detriment.
Your purpose is thus to orient yourself toward the highest goal of truth and love you can imagine at the moment. Say your truth even if it cost you your job (without being stupid), that should be a adventure in itself.
Maybe your purpose today will be to help someone you know, or to clean something, or to make the best software for someone, or to make someone smile with a good joke on a rainy day. Or it come become a big plan to start a company, etc.
It’s not one thing or a material thing, it’s the alignment of your being toward truth and love as long as possible, as often as possible. It’s a never ending journey, you can always be a bit better tomorrow.
Pray, ask the questions you have in your mind. Listen to the answer that come and see where it lead you. rince, repeat. Start reading the bible (it surprised me how good it is)
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#156In plain english, "Ikigai" is the intersection of: - what you enjoy doing - what you are good at doing - what you can get paid for doing Imagine a a circle for each of those categiries as a Venn diagram - the middle of the 3 would be "Ikigai." Try making a list of all three, then see if there is overlap.
I tried that and it completely broke me working with other people who did a shitty job of what I loved doing and didn't care. I now worked out the thing to do is earn lots of money turning something you hate but are good at into something tolerable. That gives you time, energy and money for the things you love.
Speaking of purpose, that's the purpose of friends, not of coworkers. For example, think of the Gates and Buffett friendship. Or scroll down to the bottom of any pg essay to see: "…and by the way these are my friends."
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really bad take. Adopting a random pet cause from the news, on an issue that is completely outside one’s sphere of influence, is a recipe for becoming angry and bitter, or idiotically throwing soup on paintings.
Well I agree with you on one thing, I certainly asked myself whether it even makes sense to even attempt to reason with someone who has lived his entire life with no purpose and no God and apparently no morality that would compell him to care about something other than himself. That's a dangerous individual to me, to me, it's crazy. It's like attempting to tell a politician to please stop only stealing for yourself a…
So your advice is their purpose is to find god.
Just say that instead of some rant about being offended next time, mkay?
Saying as someone with no purpose and no God and apparently no morality.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#158I take issue with traditional advice on the subject-- it's all self-centered. Finding MY purpose. MY life meaning. MY values. The path to getting there involves MY consumption of , acquisition of wealth, influence, or other forms of self-indulgence. Everything is about MY happiness. Consider that perhaps you don't find your "calling." Instead, it finds you. The only "trick" here is that you have to be reachable by pu…
> Volunteer work is a good start, missionary work is even better. I couldn’t disagree more with regard to missionary work. Having someone tell me why their sky friend needs to be in my life is outright offensive. I get a fair few US 20-25 year olds trying this crap out at my home in Auckland, New Zealand.
Same issue in Wellington. Really grinds my gears.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#159you don’t have a purpose. though, i hope you see people that need help that you provide, then you provide it.
if humans have a purpose, it is to help other humans. silicon valley types do not agree with this in my experience (they seem to require profit potential to do anything it seems) and that is a cancerous view, so don’t adopt it.
just help people once you are in a position to do it without harming yourself. Not for profit; for free. because it is the right thing. if anyone has a purpose, that is it. all else is selfishness and greed.
Re: Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?
#160> Ok, I buy this, however, what is this "purpose/ meaning/ calling/ value" thing? What does it mean, really? How do I find mine?
Human purpose is ultimately rooted in human nature and its ends. We often seem to think that either purpose is something arbitrary in relation to us or that there is some secret purpose within us that we must discover. Both fall into extremes because on the one hand, human nature determines what is valuable activity, and on the other hand, the concrete ends we engage in are various and open ended, even though they are determinations of what holds generally. Happiness is ultimately rooted in the fulfillment of human nature and its end(s), and (we cannot attain perfect fulfillment in this life), at the very least, avoiding doing things which are directly opposed to our natures.
So I would begin by trying to understand human beings by way of natural law. You'll see virtue come up in this context. The virtues are like a ladder of habits (in the sense of habitus) that lead to happiness.
Given that, I think the grand question of "finding" your purpose starts to look a bit uninteresting. Certainly, we might say some people perceive a calling, but I would be very careful not to construe this in emotional terms. All the pop culture talk about "following your passions" is absolutely disastrous. You don't follow your passions, you follow reason. This is not to say the two must be in opposition, only that the passions are often treated with an absurd reverence, as if they were some great source of hidden wisdom or "true identity".
So I wouldn't worry so much about "finding" this grand purpose of yours. If you live virtuously, you will know how to respond to the world.