It's A Purposeful Life

How can we recognize our role to play in the world around us?

What does a sense of purposelessness mean? What does it mean for someone to say that their life doesn’t matter? At its simplest, this seems to come from a sense that one’s life has no impact on the world. We feel purposeless when we feel that we have no real role to play in the world around us.

We want to know that there’s a point to our lives. What does this mean? What gives us a sense that our lives have a real impact on the world?

A Christmas Point of View

Though it’s hard for me to imagine, there are plenty of people who haven’t seen It’s A Wonderful Life. For me, it’s always been as natural as the weather getting colder or snow falling—it’s just something that has to happen in the winter.

I don’t think there’s any better story to illustrate what a real sense of purpose means. For those who have watched it, I think it’s obvious what I mean. But, for those who haven’t, I’ll offer a quick summary.

The protagonist, George Bailey finds himself in total despair. He looks at his life and sees nothing but failures: His family’s savings and loan business is failing, he is fighting with his wife and struggling with his children, and he feels as though he’s failed to live up to the ambitious standards he once had for his life. With nowhere to go, he takes himself to a bridge and prepares himself to commit suicide. But while looking into the river getting ready to throw himself off, George sees a man flailing in the river about to drown.

George rescues the man, Clarence, who claims to be his guardian angel. When George wishes that he’d never been born, Clarence grants him his wish: He shows him a world where he never existed.

But rather than seeing a world where his mistakes and failings never happened, George sees a world that has been made far, far worse by his absence. He finds that his brother—a Medal of Honor-winning pilot—died in a sledding accident as a child, and thus wasn’t there to save many of his comrades in World War 2. George’s hometown, meanwhile, is struggling under the control of a corrupt banker, Mr. Potter, without George’s family savings and loan company. He realizes that his children never existed and his family never came to be.

After seeing just how much he meant to the world, George begs for his life back. When he finally returns to the real world, he finds that the community has come to rescue his family’s business and stop Mr. Potter from taking down the Baileys’ business.

Recognizing Our Impact

I can’t do the movie justice in a few short paragraphs—if you haven’t seen it, there’s no time like the season—but it’s clear to me that this shows exactly what it means to understand your life purposefully.

When we ask for a sense of purpose, this is often what we’re looking for: We want a sense of real impact. We want to know that our actions are meaningful. How can we feel any sense of meaning when we don’t believe our actions can have any impact? Much in the same way we cannot feel fulfilled if our actions aren’t free, we can’t feel fulfilled if our actions have no consequences.

We need a true sense of weight to our actions. We need to know that our actions can have consequences, good or bad. The things we do gain meaning from their impact on the world.

Most likely, all of our lives have had impacts on the world far beyond what we realize. It’s hard to account for how we’ve changed the lives of those around us. If we ever feel any doubt about the significance of our lives, it’s worth remembering how tremendous of an impact even a small action can have.

A Role in the Story of Life

Above all, this seems to offer us a role to play in the world. When we’re looking for vocation, we’re looking for a clear sense of belonging in the world. We want to understand what part we play in the story of the world. Recognizing this impact takes us from side characters to protagonists in this story.

Of course, we don’t have the privilege of seeing what the world would be like without us. It’s not especially common for an angel to come and show you exactly what the world would be like if you’d never been born. If we feel a lack of purpose in life, we can’t count on dramatic divine intervention to show us exactly what our purpose is.

Nonetheless, we can still understand the significance of our actions through reflection. It’s possible to understand the ways we’re relied upon in life and just how the world is impacted by what we do. Though we can’t see exactly how the world would be without us, we can still find ways to recognize the impact of our lives.

Recognizing Our Responsibilities

The clearest way we can identify this impact is through taking account of our responsibilities in life. What is it that we are required to do? What are we relied upon to do?

There are all sorts of places we might perceive these responsibilities. We might think of responsibilities at work, with family, in our communities, and so on. We might think of small things—things as small as taking out the trash or checking in on a friend. In all these, we find a small sense of responsibility. In some small way, we are needed.

On their own, these small responsibilities aren’t enough to feel a sense of purpose. Your life isn’t made for the purpose of taking out the trash. But looking at these small responsibilities can point to a greater sense of calling: When we look at these small places we’re relied on, we come to see the larger story we’re a part of.

We can recognize the people who need us—what would our communities be like if we neglected to take care of them and keep them clean? In every small responsibility that we build our lives around, we start to better understand what our place is in the world.

If we could step back and see what the world would be like without us, we might be shocked to see just how radically different things would be. Whether we realize it or not, we are all absolutely central to this grand human story.

We might not have an angel to show us all this. But we can still see the signs in everyday life. In these small things, we see a wider calling to the world around us. We each have a responsibility to the world—all of us can do meaningful things.