Ask HN: How do I find my “purpose”?

Are you excited to get to know all about an aspiring jazz pianist who is trying to make it in nyc?! Well tough luck, that’s not what this film is about. Instead, after getting hooked on a character and his goals, you are instead treated to a 30m-1h sequence of “lessons” (similar to a video game tutorial that’s overstayed its welcome) about how this meta afterlife world works. Everything is explained. But the explanations suck. But I’m not even here to start taking notes on the mechanisms of this after life world (which end up being broken anyway). It’s very… boring.

The best parts of the movie are in the real world. Who is this guy? What’s his life like? What are his dreams, how does he fall short? Those are also the shortest parts of the movie.

The movie is mainly the main guy running and bouncing around trying to get back to the actual interesting part of the film.

The after life world characters are bland. They are mechanical (on purpose), which makes them difficult to connect to. I had no sympathy for their goals and struggles.

Overall Soul is a big miss for Pixar. And I love Pixar. I can see what they were going for, they wanted to make a movie about life, death, purpose, etc. This movie is not that. It’s a weird adaptation of intangible concepts personified but not done well. It’s also way too much like Inside Out, which was better (but also not anything amazing).

If you need your Pixar fix, I recommend: - Ratatouille - Coco - WallE

Children are not trophies or status symbols - they need care, love and attention, as well as independence and respect, to flourish.

If you have a family, their wellbeing and future should be your purpose.

This is a poor model.

Viktor Frankl's man's search for meaning said that purpose is to live life as if every moment had purpose. At first I found that tautological and meaningless. Running on empty is a book that addresses this topic that I found very relevant and clarifying. It is a book about childhood emotional neglect. Effectively your parents probably didn't recognize your emotions and teach you how to handle them, they might not have seen you. This can result in extreme emotional repression, complete inability to manage yourself, counter dependence (being extremely against depending on anyone for anything), the feeling that if someone knew you they wouldn't like you, and a host of other problems. When you have blunted emotions, life feels empty. This emptiness is then interpreted as lack of purpose.

So you are asking a question that protects your ego. "Finding meaning" is the ego protecting version of "feeling less empty." Feeling empty is the result of blunted emotions. Blunted emotions are a result of lessons you didn't learn during childhood (that your parents might not have learned either).

This brings us back to Viktor Frankl's living every moment as if it had purpose. Living every moment as if it has purpose is equivalent to ensuring every moment is not empty which is equivalent to living a life for which the time you spend results in feeling. If you aren't consciously aware of your feelings (if your EQ is not high) or you are not able to manipulate them, it makes it really hard to understand what it means to be in search of feeling which makes it hard to grok what these "normal" people are trying to communicate when they say something like "live every moment as if it has purpose."

Feeling is purpose. Lack of purpose is lack of feelings -> lack of feelings is lack of purpose.

So what makes you feel?

This is solidly in the territory of a therapy level problem because if your emotions are blunted there is something you don't know you don't know because there is a host of things missing from your childhood. There are things that didn't happen as opposed to things that happened that were bad.

Running on empty was a pretty good book. It is worth a read to see if it resonates with you.