Purpose

It's a question that has haunted me. I've wrestled with it. And, for a long time, I assumed the answer had to be enormous. Layered. Cosmic. Something worthy of the weight the question carries.

But the more I sit with it, the more I suspect I've been overcomplicating it. I was over-reaching for complexity. 

Humans are meaning-making creatures, and that instinct has always been tangled up with two of our deepest fears: the fear of being insignificant and the fear of death. If we can construct a grand narrative, a divine plan, a mythological order, a hidden conspiracy pulling the strings of history, then the events we observe matter; and then we matter. Our lives then become part of a story worth telling.

Religion, mythology, and yes, even conspiracy theories, all serve a version of this same psychological need. They offer the comfort of a universe that notices us, one where nothing happens by accident and everything points toward something. That's not a criticism. The impulse to tell stories larger than life is profoundly human. When faced with the terrifying possibility that existence might be random, that we might be brief sparks in an indifferent cosmos, the mind reaches for pattern and meaning the way a hand reaches for a railing in the dark.

But sometimes, things just happen.

Consider one of the most reported events in modern history: the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Decades of investigations, documentaries, and theories have tried to construct a narrative grand enough to match the enormity of the loss, including being moles, double agents, and shadow governments. These coordinated conspiracies try to reveal a story of powerful forces shaping our world. And yet, at the end of all that inquiry, the reports point to something almost unbearably mundane: an insignificant, troubled man with a shotgun who got to fire off three shots to kill the most powerful man in the world. No grand design. No puppet masters. Just a moment, a decision, with consequences that changed everything. History doesn't always bend at the hands of the powerful. Sometimes the desperate make a statement. Not every catastrophe has a conspiracy behind it.

We struggle to accept that. We struggle to accept it in history, and we struggle to accept it in our own lives.

Because if the universe isn't orchestrating events for a reason,  if the patterns we see are ones we've projected rather than ones we've discovered, then what is the point? Why get up? Why try?

Here's where I land: the purpose of life isn't hidden in the stars or encrypted in ancient texts. It doesn't require decoding. It's quieter than that, and simpler, and honestly more demanding.

Every day, ordinary people experience what I can only call magic moments: a conversation that shifts something inside them, a project that lights them up, a kind conversation with a stranger they carry with them the rest of the day. These moments don't announce themselves as meaningful. They just are. And I think that's the whole game.

I've lived a few of these moments myself, and none of them came with a drumroll.

Years ago, I was a student at UC Santa Barbara. One afternoon, I stopped at the two water pools on campus (that were empty with no water). Nothing remarkable about the day. A young woman was there. We exchanged the kind of brief, forgettable pleasantries that happen. But, it was unforgettable. “I hope we will meet again later,” I left thinking. Just another meeting, though. I didn't know her name. She didn't know mine. We went our separate ways. It was only later, years later, when I saw her face on a late-night television show that I instantly recognized her.  Then years later I confirmed that she and I went to UCSB at the same time. With the confirmation, I finally realized I had met Gwyneth Paltrow before the world knew who she was. There was no significance to it at the moment. No cosmic wink. Just two people at a water fountain on an ordinary afternoon. And yet, I've thought about it more times than I can count.

What struck me wasn't the brush with anybody special. It was the reminder that every unremarkable moment has a version of that story in it. We just rarely get the sequel that lets us see it.

I think about a similar kind of synchronicity that happened much later, when I was working as a QA manager for a brake pad manufacturer. We had a meeting scheduled at Brembo, the legendary Italian braking systems company, and I traveled to Stezzano, in northern Italy, for it. Before the meeting, my colleague Shoji and I stopped at a small café in town. It was the kind of place you'd find anywhere in Italy, unhurried, espresso-scented, just the ordinary rhythms of a morning. And then Shoji went very still. Across the café was a woman he recognized. His ex-fiancée from Japan. She was there, in Stezzano, working. Of all the cafés in all the towns in all of northern Italy, the two of them met at the same one on the same morning, both busy in their day-to-day lives, working. A couple of years and thousands of miles removed from where their story had begun. We went on to our meeting at Brembo afterward. But, we both remember that chance meeting.

Was it meaningful? I still don't know. But it was undeniable.

I notice these collisions at smaller scales, too. At networking events, I'll run into someone I know from one part of my life, and within minutes we'll discover we share a mutual acquaintance from a completely different town, someone neither of us thought to connect to the other. It happens often enough that I've stopped being surprised by it. The web of human connection is tighter and stranger than any map we could draw of it. People overlap in ways that have no clean explanation, and the overlaps keep revealing themselves.

The temptation, of course, is to read destiny into all of this. To say: it was meant to happen. There's a plan. But I think that's the wrong lesson. Because what these moments actually show isn't that the universe is writing our stories for us. It's that the world is more densely connected than we feel on any given Tuesday, and that showing up, actually being present, in the café, at the water fountain, at the networking table, is what makes it possible for the unexpected to find you.

Find what makes you happy. Really sit with that question, and not what you think should make you happy, not what looks good from the outside, but what genuinely fills you up. Then find what keeps you excited. Excitement is underrated as a compass; it points toward your edge, toward growth, toward the version of yourself you're still becoming. And finally, ask how you can help the most people around you. Not in some grandiose, save-the-world way, but just in the real, immediate, human way that's available to all of us right now.

Different people have different gifts, different capacities, different circumstances. The question isn't whether you can do everything. It's whether you can respond to the needs in front of you with the best of what you have.

That's it. That's the whole philosophy.

You can lose years chasing mythology, waiting for the universe to hand you a sign. Or you can start with what's in front of you by asking the question of if you can help someone today. “Can I be useful?”

So, perhaps the purpose of my life is to help people, to be effective, and to better myself. And perhaps that, at its core, is the whole point. Not a battle to decode the universe, but a daily commitment to happiness, excitement, and service. Simple. Quiet. Enough.