“We are what our thoughts have made us; so, take care about what you think. Words are secondary thoughts that live; they travel far.”

–SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

Purposelessness

Purposeless but Not Hopeless: How to Live With Life’s Meaninglessness

Each and every person must have experienced the feeling of purposelessness in life. Purposelessness is the quality of lacking any definite purpose or having no values or significance in life. I have also gone through this feeling of purposelessness, not only once but many times. And I am still struggling to find my purpose in life. During this journey of finding purpose for life, I visualized some reasons and hurdles that actually block our road to a purposeful life. So, I thought to share these points with you and hope this will help you make a road map to your purpose.

Only after understanding why I feel purposeless can I find a solution to my problems. Nobody would ever be able to feel the pain or impact that I am experiencing. If I ask myself, ‘Why do I feel purposelessness in life?’ the answer would be ‘because I am unable to think’.

If I ask myself, ‘why do I feel vacuum in life?’ the answer would be – because it all happens in my subconscious mind. Most of the time we are just not aware of our subconscious thoughts, which create problem for us.

And then comes the most important question- ‘Why do I feel Purposelessness?’

There could be as many reasons as you think of the question. I am mentioning some of them here in order to make it easy to analyze your thought.

1. Allowing others to decide your life decisions

When I give the steering of my life in other’s hand and let them drive where they want to, my self-esteem suddenly goes downwards. Every individual has right to take their own decision. I just need to take up the responsibility of my happiness and sorrows in my hands. Usually, we let our parents and other elders decide about our eating, our playing time, our studies and friends.

Our parents decide in which school we will study, what course we will pursue, which career to choose and whom to marry. And as time passes, these become our habit to depend upon others for our every single decision. So, it’s better to take your own decision. We may make mistakes, trust wrong person, may lose hope at times, may fall but after every fall we will rise back stronger than before.

2. Being too busy to remember the passion

When we are passionate for what we are doing, we live a better and beautiful life. But there are many individuals who live for survival and don’t even think about their passion. Problem comes only to those individuals who think of passion but still fight for survival. This happens because we are so busy in our daily life, doing daily stuffs, jobs and other parts of life. It’s like living a life with blind eyes where we just wake up every day do our daily stuffs and sleep. We don’t enjoy the beauty of living.

The very first step we can take is to break our thought process in the mind for a while. And only when we do so, we gain clarity of life purpose. But this needs to be done systematically.

3. Difficulty in locating the purpose

Most of the time a person wants to live a purposeful life but have fear to make big changes. May be because s/he was not able to find the purpose from a long time. And when this happens, we start doubting ourselves whether we exist for a purpose or not? Our mind doubts whether there’s a meaning of our being or not? But only when we are able to cross these hurdles of disbelieve, we will be able to find meaning to life and get idea of purpose. It’s hard to defeat mind and get motivated about life.

This is because we have lived long without knowing about purpose of life. We don’t even know the worth of life we have lived till now. Whereas the life we lived has a contribution to the big picture of our purpose.

4. Lack of Support System

As the word itself talks about support. It is something available to anybody in form of family, friends, co-workers, or partner who are there for behavioral or emotional support. And we tend to believe what people in our support system say. But in many cases, our support system tends to block our way to purpose, or said few things in past which our mind perceived negatively which results in purposelessness in mind. At the same time those people who had a good discussion with support system find it easy to gain clarity of life. It is helpful to just share your heart and feelings with the one who is there to support you.

5. Thinking too much

The intensity of vacuum increases in mind when in day-in & day-out we keep thinking of an ideal life. Living a purposeful life is important but thinking about lack of purpose deviates responsibilities and demand of daily life. Overthinking is also known as ‘analysis paralysis’ because by thinking too much we are getting stuck in our thoughts and stop ourselves from making actions.

6. Disqualifying the life, you have already lived

Our mind makes us self-blame or self-doubt. It irrationally disqualifies the life achievements that have happened in life till now. And the mind puts the blame for every failure on us. The mind has the tendency to compare itself with other’s achievements. Many times, we feel vacuumed out because of self-rejection.

You must ask yourself: Did your life happen the way it happened only because of you? or were there other circumstances in it?

Now, we can say that we feel the vacuum not because we don’t have any purpose but because of the thoughts around us. All this is a game played by the mind. Either we learn to get control over our mind, or the mind will have control over our feelings and emotions.

Feeling vacuumed is normal and happens to everyone at some stage of life. But after knowing that we are feeling this because of our own thoughts and being in this thinking cycle, we need to take charge of our thoughts. Otherwise, our mind is capable of making things worse for us. And now that we know the reason, we must take voluntary actions.

Learn more: Mindfulness and Mental Health Awareness

Learn more on The Art of Thinking

Pushplata Sharma, Psychologist, MA (Psychology).

Your Confidant

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