Your purpose is the reason you are here on Earth. It’s the thing that you were built for. So it’s an incredibly important thing to figure out, because it’s the thing that guides you.
Without a purpose, you’re lost. You have no North Star. Your life will feel meaningless.
And so today I’m going to talk about how to discover your purpose according to the philosophy of Carl Jung. While writing what is now widely considered his central work, The Red Book, Jung discovered the purpose of his own life. But he didn’t just discover the purpose of his own life.
He also discovered where purpose comes from for all of us. And based on my understanding of The Red Book, Jung says that your purpose is found in performing voluntary self-sacrifice. What would you willingly sacrifice yourself for?
This means that your purpose isn’t found in money, car, clothes, status, or any other self-serving pleasure, but rather, your purpose is found in the thing that you would willingly suffer for. Your purpose lies in serving something that you deem as greater and more valuable than your own existence. But what if you can’t find anything greater or more valuable than your own existence?
Then you will experience life as meaningless and empty. A modern proverb states that life only promises us two things: death and taxes. And what does that mean?
It means that life demands a sacrifice from us all. Death and taxes are both a form of self-sacrifice. All life is born to be sacrificed in some way.
We’re not getting out of this thing called life without sacrificing ourselves. Even the food that we eat is, in some way, sacrificed for our own continued existence. And so if you have nothing greater than yourself to sacrifice your time and energy for, you end up investing all your life force into yourself.
But since you eventually have to be sacrificed, all the energy that you invest in yourself essentially just goes to waste. And so if all your energy is just going to be wasted, that makes your life meaningless. Without a North Star or purpose outside of yourself, your life just becomes empty and meaningless suffering.
But if you find something worth sacrificing yourself for, worth serving and dedicating your life too, then your suffering becomes meaningful, and when your suffering becomes meaningful, in some way, as both Friedrich Nietzsche and Viktor Frankl have noted, it ceases to be suffering. And you know this idea is true when you see it. If you see someone willing to sacrifice themselves for something greater than themselves, you tend to think that they’ve found their purpose.
When Socrates was imprisoned by his people, he had a chance to run and escape. But he willingly sacrificed himself for the principles of truth, justice, and honor. By sacrificing his own life, he believed that he was doing what was necessary to serve his city: Athens.
Jesus willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity. And Cato, who in some ways can be thought of as the Roman Socrates, sacrificed his life as a final resistance against Caesar’s rule, because he refused to serve under someone he viewed as a tyrant. He sacrificed himself for the principles of liberty and freedom.
And regardless of what you think of these three names, there’s one thing you can’t deny: these men all had a purpose. They were on a mission. And the reason you know that is because they all found something more important than themselves that they thought it was worth sacrificing their own lives for.
But we don’t need to go to big historic examples to find people who found something worth sacrificing themselves for. This happens everyday. There are mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children, missionaries for their church, cops for justice, activists for equality, and soldiers for freedom.
Every day, people find something worth sacrificing themselves for, and by doing so, they discover their own purpose. So what does it look like to implement Carl Jung’s wisdom of voluntary self-sacrifice into our own lives? We can take it day by day and dedicate ourselves to the service of others in a way we would be willing to do.
We can serve others in a way that we would want to serve them, in a way that we would be happy to wake up each day and do. We can create something that we would be willing to completely sacrifice ourselves for, because eventually, we will be forced to. That is what life demands of us all.
But if you don’t discover your purpose, your life becomes a forced sacrifice, and a forced sacrifice is felt as tyrannical and oppressive. You’ll start to experience life as a great evil. But if you discover your purpose, your life becomes a voluntary sacrifice.
And a voluntary sacrifice, such as that of a mother for her child, is felt as incredibly meaningful. And so if you discover your purpose, you will experience life as incredibly meaningful and good. So I’ll ask again: what would you willingly sacrifice yourself for?
That’s where your purpose lies.
