Is Purpose Anxiety a Thing?
Dec 22, 2023
Are we working too hard trying to “discover our higher purpose” - putting ourselves under too much pressure? Author and thought leader Liz Gilbert seems to think so. On Kate Bowler’s podcast yesterday she said this:
“There is a pathological obsession, and I don’t use the word pathological lightly, in this country with making sure your life has a higher purpose, rather than just having a life, which is already pretty incredible.“
Gilbert, whose brain, spirit and work I adore, goes on to say there’s incredible pressure to identify the singular thing that only we can do, then master it, then promote it, and naturally, monetize it. Many people, she said, are now suffering under this weight, which she named purpose anxiety. It keeps them from just relaxing and enjoying their lives.
Whoa.
As someone who helps people build lives of meaning and purpose for a living, I decided to sit back and measure myself against that indictment.
Is that what I’m doing?
Am I teaching people to strive and come up short in yet another area? Teaching them they should pursue, cultivate, curate, master, and monetize their gifts so they can finally feel like their lives are enough?
What if my own bent toward performance, hyper-achievement, and improving everything is leading people down a path to anxiety?
Yikes.
Let’s Take It Apart.
If I have an Achilles heel, it’s the thought that nothing I do is enough - that I should always do it better. Part of that comes from my Enneagram 3 personality (I’m a performer and a fixer) and the idea of constant self-improvement has been conditioned in most of us since childhood.
Since I move the goalposts every time I kick it in most areas of my life, why would purpose-seeking be any different? Is the drive toward building a purposeful life keeping me from seeing and enjoying where normal life is already incredibly wonderful, creative, and meaningful? This seems to be Gilbert’s point.
Am I Enough? Will I Be Loved?
Humans are always asking these two questions and many of us learned early that high performance earns love. This is one root of perfectionism.
Add that to our innate desire for purpose - which I believe is actually an innate desire to contribute to others, to create shalom - and it’s no surprise we wind up with anxiety.
Am I purposing enough? Am I doing enough with my one wild and precious life? At what level must I perform to be loved? Worst of all: Does God think I’m doing enough?
That’s exhausting and I think Gilbert is inviting us to stop and count the cost of applying a hustle-culture mentality to our very humanity.
You can see this bubbling up in lots of other places where people are choosing rest and detaching from all sorts of systems, especially those that benefit fiscally from our anxiety and drivenness.
Yes, of course there’s a balance.
Most people come to me, so miserable, so lost, and so confused about their changing roles and desires. They need help to get out of where they are and move into something better.
Because I struggled with that same lostness in midlife, I have a pretty solid map. The light at the edge of the woods comes from the things we’re curious about, the things we hope for and that light is well worth chasing. People like me are useful in this regard.
But can I poison that lovely glimmer with hustle culture, performance, and my own dysregulated Enneagram three-ness? Of course. But I can also keep myself in check and point to that light, encouraging people, and reaching for their hands when they fall.
So here are six things I've concluded are really important to know about pursuing a life of purpose.
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Purpose in life isn’t discovered, it’s built. In that construction, we are invited to get rid of old stories, damaging habits, and other lesser things. The reward for that hard work is the people we get to become.
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Trying to live true to our design with faith and boldness is the best way I know to grow into a better human, one who is capable of loving God, self, and others.
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The pressure is off. I could sit on my butt for the rest of my life and God won’t love me any less. My people won’t either. So building a purposeful life really is about me and what I want to do here. I don't need to be anxious about it. In fact, Jesus would prefer I wasn’t.
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There are many paths to many purposes because life has many chapters. Moms know this in a deep way, which is why empty-nest properly considered is a great opportunity.
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Feeling off-purpose and living without meaning is just as intolerable as the pressure of feeling we must change the world every day with our gifts and purposeful brilliance.
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Now is all there ever is and gratitude for what is right now is the portal to contentment.
One last thing that might help
Over Christmas, my mom had a book on her coffee table that she’d picked up at church. It’s called Holy Moments and is written by one of my favorite authors and thought leaders Matthew Kelly.
In it, he too describes a path to purpose.
Perhaps more important than our own ideas and plans for purpose is our availability to what God already has in mind. Kelly calls these holy moments and we miss them all the time because we’re too focused on our own agendas - controlling for what we think is purposeful.
Kelly asks, how willing are we to set aside our agendas to allow God to flow through us in a collaboration which, Kelly says, is certain to “release pure unmitigated joy.”
Isn’t that what we all want anyway?
So that was my prayer this morning. Lord, please walk me into those collaborations because I’m too tired to go find/create them myself. Guess what? He did.
Kelly maintains that we broke this world with our unholy moments, so we should be able to fix it by being available to trillions of tiny, holy moments. Pop over to his website to see his plan for doing that.
