Think for yourself

It was Socrates, the so-called father of philosophy who said the “unexamined life is not worth living.” This is where any thinking about purpose has to begin. The unexamined life is not worth living – a quote you might be familiar with because its splashed around quite a bit. It may be well-known, but it’s not very well applied. Here’s what Socrates said in full: “If I tell you, that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others, is really the very best thing a person can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will not be inclined to believe me.”

Purpose starts with thinking for yourself. Thinking about what is good and what is worth living for. The challenge is whether we’ve got a habit of doing that, whether we can say we’ve ever done that. Quite honestly, it’s hard. And it’s because there’s something in us that makes us disposed NOT to prioritise this. In other words, the single biggest obstacle to a life of purpose can be our own APATHY. Outsourcing our thinking to others and ending up with lives of triviality and the pursuit of things which don’t really matter. It’s just easier to watch Netflix. Vaclav Havel, who had amazing purpose in subverting communism in the Soviet Union through literature said: “the tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”

Socrates was murdered by the nobility of Athens, literally, for asking too many questions – on a trumped-up charge of poisoning the minds of the youth for teaching them to challenge the ideas of the culture. And it’s this striving for independence of thought where a life of purpose has to begin. I say striving because there is so much about our world which is set up to distract us from thinking about difficult things and it will always be easier to accept the ideas of our culture without question. But to live a life of purpose, we need to somehow take action to think for ourselves and overcome the incessant distraction and diversion in the world. You must decide whether the ideas or ideals that our culture offers up are bringing the fulfilment they promise. Think for yourself.