What could you be best at? What do you want? What are you incapable of not doing? What’s the one thing that if you could do it for the rest of your life, you would? What do you love? It seems like no matter who you talk to, where you talk to them, or what their relationship is to you, these are the kinds of questions that are offered as guidance when the lingering anxieties of self and time emerge into conversation. These are questions so endlessly riffed, reoriented, and persistent that it is hard to know exactly who or where they came from. And yet, despite their ubiquity and frequent reiteration, I find them almost impossible to answer.
At the core of these questions really is one question that hides inside of them: What is my purpose? What am I here to do? While I don’t want to overread it, I think it is important to note two critical implications tucked into this question. First, that a person exists to do something specific; that there is one dominant activity that I am meant to craft my life around. (Side note: theologically, it seems to me that there is something specific we are meant to do, namely love God and love others. What I am after here is how we discern the way in which we go about that, keeping in mind that this overhead task is complicated and varied in its expressions). And the second implication in these questions is that a person could miss the thing they are supposed to do; that somehow, despite the fact that this purpose is theirs, there is a possibility that they won’t find or achieve it.
And to just cut through the floatiness of this, I think what most are really after when they ask this question (myself perhaps foremost) is not some abstract mission or vocation, some magic context where, as Frederick Buechner is so often quoted, “your talent meets the world’s great need.” What we’re looking for is stability: a job that supports our lives, a series of activities we enjoy, a community of people with which we belong. The hope is that somewhere there exists an answer to the question that merges those three things into a continuous experience of belonging and contentment, one where the means and the ends of living a life become united into a single activity, an immaculate practice that appeases both our needs and desires. Changing the world is great, and I hope in my own way I do that, but really the concern is just finding a way to be alive and feel at peace with it.
At least to me, the probability of that kind of context (or vocation, or career—pick your label) sounds slim, if possible at all. And if the very questions we’re asking are rooted in a search for something that doesn’t exist, or that doesn’t likely exist, let me suggest that maybe the questions cannot provide a helpful answer—at least as long as we ask them without the appropriate caveats in mind. I take some of those caveats to be the following.
First, there is no one we have to be; yes, there are guiding forces—religion, morality, talent, skills, the past, etc—that dictate particular values and offer directions, but there’s not some complete picture of us, living somewhere out in time waiting for us to become them. Or someone waiting and ready to hold you to account for not becoming that complete picture. We are—and that entails thousands of possibilities and opportunities for who we could become.
Second, there might just be a number of things we could do—and I mean this especially in the vocation/career sense. There’s not one thing we’re made for, even if there is perhaps one thing we could be best at. But there’s no reason to think that the thing we are doing now, or might be doing in the future, isn’t the thing we could be best at. And even if there was reason to think that, is it really that bad if we are not doing the thing we’re best at—especially if what we’re doing now is fruitful in its own way?
I don’t want to say that these purpose-oriented questions are useless, but I think they need a lot more care than the simple answers they presume—especially because they seem intended to produce a solution to a complicated, perhaps even impossible problem. So while I think they can be helpful, let me put it this way. What is my purpose? I don’t have one.
I’m not for one thing, or meant to become one thing. There’s a lot of things I could do, or become, or enjoy, each one contributing its own beauties and disappointments. But I’m not going to miss out on some magical life by simply doing what makes sense, what seems best or most reasonable until it doesn’t make sense anymore. We can ask the questions, but I think we should expect less from their answers—and also allow our answers to change. We are, and that’s not something a single question or answer can solve.
Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.
