The War Against Your Purpose

How Your Upbringing Shapes Your View of Purpose

Depending on your upbringing, education, culture, career journey, and life path, the word “purpose” may conjure up a variety of different things for you. Your culture has immense influence over your concept of purpose in life.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional or abusive home, the thought of a unique purpose for your life may have never even entered your mind; a victim’s sole focus in life is simply surviving whatever chaos or pain the day reveals, with small interludes of calm smattered in between.

The Impact of Overbearing Environments and Education Systems

If you grew up with overbearing parents or within a very rigid religious system, fostering your individual purpose may also not have been on the radar. Likewise, in an Eastern or tribal family system, your roles are well-defined for you. You were expected to conform to a set of social norms.

Bad education does this by design, by the way; it fosters conformity, not individual actualization. Bad education—which is becoming more the norm—is more indoctrination than education.

The Historical Suppression of Individual Purpose

Most of us experience society’s deadening influence on our personal sense of purpose in some form or fashion because it was the norm for thousands of years. Your lot in life was often determined based on your class, your family, your trade, etc.

A Modern Shift: The Rise of Personal Purpose

It is only in the meteoric rise of humanity’s prosperity in the past few hundred years—especially the last 50—that personal purpose and actualization has even popped on the radar. When we consider Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, this does make sense. History has been a long story of war and the fight to get our basic needs met.

The Privilege and Power of Purpose

Only now, with agricultural and economic development settled for most of the developed world, do we have the absolute privilege to consider the loftier aspirations of personal purpose.

Still, I would argue that even in the deepest privation and darkest days of suffering, a deeply anchored sense of purpose or meaning for your life is the antidote and motivation to weather such days and to see yourself through to walk again in the warm light of better days.