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🩸 🌅 🧠 🌊 Finding Yourself Through Purpose
Lesson 1 of 12 — Is Happiness Really the Purpose of Life?
Before trying to discover your purpose, there is a more basic question worth examining: What do you believe life is actually for?
🩸 RedBloodJournal.com — A Record. A Voice. A Purpose.
This is the beginning of a twelve-part Red Blood Journal course called Finding Yourself Through Purpose. It is not designed to give you another belief system to memorize, another teacher to follow, or another definition of purpose to accept because someone else sounds certain about it. The purpose of the course is almost the opposite: to examine the ideas, assumptions, fears, desires, values, and inherited voices that may already be operating inside you, sometimes without your realizing where they came from.
Before asking, What is my purpose?, we therefore need to ask something even more fundamental: What do I currently believe the purpose of life is?
Ask enough people that question and several answers appear again and again. Some will say the purpose of life is to be happy. Others will say it is to experience joy. Some will say the purpose is simply to live, to experience life while we have it, and not turn existence into an intellectual puzzle.
All of those answers contain something valuable. Happiness matters. Joy matters. Being alive matters. But something can be valuable without necessarily being the purpose around which everything else is organized.
That distinction is where our investigation begins.
Is Happiness the Destination?
Suppose the purpose of life is happiness. It sounds reasonable because almost everyone would rather experience happiness than suffering. We naturally move toward pleasure, security, affection, satisfaction, companionship, and experiences that make life feel worthwhile.
But what happens during the periods when happiness disappears?
A person may lose someone they love and spend months grieving. A parent may care for a sick child while experiencing exhaustion, fear, financial strain, and emotional pain. A husband or wife may spend years caring for a spouse whose health is declining, experiencing sleepless nights, frustration, sadness, sacrifice, and very little pleasure in the ordinary meaning of the word.
Would we conclude that these lives suddenly became purposeless because happiness was absent?
Most of us probably would not. In fact, we may recognize tremendous meaning precisely in the actions being taken during those difficult periods. Caring for someone may not feel pleasurable. Remaining beside someone during suffering may not make us happy. Responsibility can be exhausting. Love can require sacrifice.
Yet something inside us recognizes that difficulty does not automatically erase meaning.
Someone may also work for years toward something that matters deeply to them and fail repeatedly along the way. They may experience embarrassment, rejection, uncertainty, fatigue, and doubt. The process may be uncomfortable, but that discomfort can become part of what makes the achievement meaningful.
This suggests that happiness and purpose may be connected without being identical.
Happiness may accompany purpose. Purpose may sometimes create happiness. But purpose may also remain when happiness temporarily disappears.
That distinction matters because when happiness becomes our only compass, discomfort begins to look like evidence that something is wrong. We may abandon meaningful commitments because they become difficult. We may avoid responsibility because responsibility does not always feel good. We may mistake temporary pain for proof that we are walking the wrong path.
Perhaps happiness is not the destination. Perhaps it is one of many conditions we experience while traveling.
What About Simply Living?
Another beautiful answer says that the purpose of life is simply to live.
There is wisdom in that idea. Life does not necessarily need to justify its existence. A flower does not prepare an argument explaining why it blooms, and a bird does not develop a philosophy before it flies. There is something profound about simply recognizing the value of existence.
But the answer still leaves another question.
How should we live?
Two people can both be alive while creating completely different lives. One may spend decades consumed by resentment while another spends those same decades helping people. One may organize life around accumulation while another organizes life around creation. One may spend a lifetime obeying whatever is expected, while another examines every assumption inherited from family, culture, religion, government, education, and society.
Both are alive.
So perhaps being alive is the condition that makes purpose possible, but it does not completely answer what we choose to do with that life.
Existence gives us the canvas. It does not automatically determine what we paint on it.
What About Joy?
Joy is sometimes described as something deeper than happiness. Happiness may depend heavily on circumstances, while joy can sometimes exist even when circumstances are imperfect.
There may be truth in that distinction, but joy creates a similar question.
There are moments when doing what you believe is right may bring no joy at all. Telling the truth can cost you something. Walking away from something comfortable because you recognize that it is damaging you may hurt. Protecting another person can create problems for yourself. Confronting something inside your own character that you would rather ignore can be deeply uncomfortable.
These experiences may contain little immediate joy, yet they may become some of the most important moments of your life.
Perhaps happiness and joy sometimes appear as consequences of alignment rather than the purpose itself. When the way a person thinks, speaks, acts, and lives begins moving in the same direction, another kind of satisfaction can emerge.
It is not permanent happiness. It is not endless pleasure. It is something quieter: the sense that your life is being lived deliberately rather than accidentally.
That brings us to a different question.
What am I becoming through the way I live?
Feelings Are Information, Not Always Instructions
Imagine someone saying, “My purpose is to be happy.”
Now ask what happens if happiness requires betraying another person. What if happiness requires avoiding responsibility? What if pleasure comes from something that will eventually destroy your health, your relationships, your integrity, or someone else’s wellbeing?
Human beings can experience pleasure from things that harm them. We can become comfortable inside habits that prevent growth. We can experience satisfaction from winning at somebody else’s expense.
This does not mean feelings should be rejected. Happiness matters. Joy matters. Sadness matters. Fear matters. Pain matters. Pleasure matters. Every one of these experiences can contain useful information.
But information is not automatically instruction.
Feeling afraid does not always mean stop. Feeling happy does not always mean continue. Feeling pain does not automatically mean something is wrong. Feeling pleasure does not automatically mean something is right.
Emotions tell us something is happening. They do not always tell us what we should do about it.
That is why the question of purpose becomes more difficult than it first appears.
Maybe purpose has less to do with maintaining a particular emotional state and more to do with what a person chooses to do with consciousness, freedom, relationships, responsibility, ability, time, and experience.
From “What Do I Want?” to “What Do I Want My Life to Express?”
There is a useful distinction between two questions:
What do I want to feel?
and
What kind of person do I want to become?
The first points toward experience. The second points toward development.
There is another distinction worth considering:
What do I want from life?
and
What do I want my life to express?
The first question asks what existence can provide us. The second asks what we might contribute through existence.
Neither question is wrong, but they point in different directions.
Then there is perhaps an even more revealing question:
What is worth doing even when it does not make me happy?
Think about the people, responsibilities, promises, principles, and creations that matter most to you. Would you abandon all of them the moment they stopped producing happiness?
If your answer is no, then somewhere inside yourself you already recognize that meaning can extend beyond happiness.
A parent may willingly lose sleep for a child. Someone may endure years of study to master a discipline. A person may devote time to an aging parent. Someone may spend decades building something they believe should exist. A person may forgive when resentment would be easier, or admit being wrong when protecting pride would feel better.
These actions may involve discomfort, but discomfort does not automatically remove purpose.
Sometimes discomfort may be the price of expressing it.
This Course Will Not Give You Your Purpose
There is an important principle behind Finding Yourself Through Purpose: I am not going to hand you a final answer and ask you to adopt it.
Doing that would defeat the purpose of the course.
Over the coming lessons, we will examine what you inherited, what you were taught to want, what you fear, what you desire, what you say, what you actually do, what you value, what you refuse to compromise, what makes you feel alive, and what remains important when nobody is watching.
Eventually, we will ask what kind of life those pieces appear to be pointing toward.
You do not have to agree with every idea presented. You do not have to adopt another belief system. You do not have to replace one authority with another.
Your responsibility is simpler and more difficult:
Observe. Question. Compare. Examine. Decide.
A purpose handed to you by somebody else can easily become another form of conditioning. The goal is not to replace one voice inside your head with my voice, your parents’ voice, a priest’s voice, a professor’s voice, an influencer’s voice, a politician’s voice, or society’s voice.
The goal is to become capable of examining all of them.
Your Lesson 1 Reflection
Before continuing to Lesson 2, write down your answer to this question:
What do I currently believe the purpose of my life is?
Do not search for an impressive answer. Do not write what a spiritual person is supposed to say. Do not write what your family would approve of. Do not write what sounds intelligent, enlightened, optimistic, or profound.
Write the first honest answer that comes.
Then answer these questions:
Where did I get this answer?
Did I consciously choose this belief, or did I inherit it?
Would this purpose still matter during a period when I was not happy?
What is worth doing even when it does not make me happy?
If my current answer disappeared, what would remain?
Finally, complete this sentence without overthinking it:
Right now, I think a meaningful life is one in which I…
Keep what you write. Do not come back tomorrow and make it prettier. Do not correct it to fit whatever you learn later.
At the end of this twelve-part journey, return to your original answer.
You may discover that it changed completely. You may discover that parts of it survived. You may even discover that your first instinct was closer to what you truly believed than all of the sophisticated answers you developed afterward.
Every result is useful.
Finding purpose is not about producing the perfect sentence.
It is about understanding the person producing it.
What Comes Next
Lesson 2 takes us backward thousands of years to one of humanity’s oldest surviving ethical traditions and three extraordinarily simple principles associated with Zoroastrian thought:
Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.
But we will not stop at repeating the phrase.
We will ask the more difficult question:
What makes a thought, a word, or a deed “good” — and according to whom?
That investigation begins in Lesson 2.
🩸 The Red Blood Perspective
Modern life constantly tells us what we should want: happiness, success, recognition, money, security, approval, status, comfort, productivity, and belonging. Some of those things can improve life, but the danger begins when borrowed desires become invisible and we mistake them for our own.
Finding yourself requires more than choosing between the options placed in front of you. It requires examining who created the options, who taught you what success looks like, what experiences shaped your fears, what rewards trained your behavior, and whether the person living your life is actually the person choosing it.
Purpose cannot be discovered honestly until we are willing to distinguish what came from within from what was placed there from outside.
🌊✨ Ocean of Love and Positivity Perspective
The purpose of self-examination is not to judge or punish ourselves for the lives we have already lived. Awareness should become an instrument of growth, correction, understanding, and greater freedom.
You may discover beliefs that no longer serve you. You may recognize choices you would make differently today. You may discover that some of the things you were taught were exactly right for you. None of these discoveries requires shame.
The invitation is simply to become more conscious of the person behind the choices.
Positive thought does not mean denying pain. Positive speech does not mean pretending everything is fine. Positive action does not require perfection. It means trying, as consciously as we can, to move thought, word, and action toward greater understanding, honesty, compassion, responsibility, and love.
That journey begins with one truthful question:
What do I really believe my life is for?
In an Ocean of Love and Positivity.
🩸🌊✨ Fantastic!
https://redbloodjournal.com/courses/finding-yourself-through-purpose/