Christine Kim / Daily Nexus

College—prime time to have your first existential crisis.

Before you decide your major, you have to decide what job you want to eventually hold; before you decide what job you want, you have to decide what it is that you want to do with your life; and in order to decide that, you have to casually figure out what your purpose in life is; and in order to figure out what your purpose is, you must first derive what the point of life in general is.

Suddenly you’ve got yourself a bit of an existential crisis.

When we haven’t uncovered the point of life or our role in it, we must then dedicate ourselves to the next level down of things that we can figure out—what kind of job we want, what kind of things we can do. When the ultimate purpose is unknown, we must seek whatever is below that, which is able to invest in us a sense of cause and reason.

So on we trudge, on the path to achieve this sort of purpose, concealed as validation, that we have selected for ourselves. Thus we select our major, fret over internships, and desperately seek out ‘respectable’ employment.

Thus we dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of titles, accolades, awards, achievements, praise—validation. For that is the greatest sense of purpose we can seek to achieve, that is the only kind of purpose we understand, that we have ever known. We have ascribed power to this particular sense of validation so that it may suffice in appeasing our minds of its unquenchable and innate desire for a grander purpose.

So on we trudge, on the path to achieve this sort of purpose, concealed as validation, that we have selected for ourselves. Thus we select our major, fret over internships, and desperately seek out ‘respectable’ employment.

 

But let us fast forward to the future and see where following such a path leads you:

Up comes the next existential crisis.

You’re thirty-five. You’ve either attained your pursuits or you haven’t. Either way, you’re having another crisis. You’re halfway to dead and you’re once more trying to decode the meaning of life and your purpose in it, which suddenly seems extremely separated from your occupation.

How did you ever think that your grand purpose in life could be derived from your job?

Ok backtrack to now. Let’s quickly trap this hypothetical scenario in its path as to prevent it from ever happening. Let’s just figure out what our purpose in life is now, so as to prevent any crisis. Great. Easy. Crack open some books: some Aristotle, some Nietzche, maybe the Bible?

Hmm, seems like no one else has a solid, fully comprehensive answer either, or at least nothing that particularly appeals to you.

Fantastic.

What ultimate good are we prescribing our actions to be based on?

Now let’s suppose you found religious texts that did appeal to you. Maybe you’re into the idea of believing in Christ and getting to go to heaven, or doing good deeds and getting reincarnated into a prince in your next life, but what are you supposed to do right now? You need to pick a major. A job. A path. Do you just pick something you like? Something you’re good at? But what if that’s not what you’re supposed to be doing?

It seems that when, in life, you cannot get the return of a definite sense of universal purpose, you must strive instead for the other kind of return. As in, “returns” as they exist today. Decision made. Engineering or Economics, it’s up to you. Both have high probability of high returns, and if you enjoy it, all the better. Of course there are those that choose English or Art and have thus chosen a different kind of return, risking attainment of the traditional monetary gains to remain on this path where at least their happiness will not be at the same risk.

But if people use their careers as what gives their life purpose, then does that make them hedonists? Does that make the former group Marxists? Both kinds of decisions are made on a faulty basis of returns, as is the decision of your high school classmate who dropped out of school to go live in the wilderness. No matter how noble and courageous that action may have seemed, as of our current understanding, it’s end is as lacking as that of the engineer, the economist, the writer, and the artist. 

Do not resign your identity to what it says on a business card.

What ultimate good are we prescribing our actions to be based on?

We cannot know the answer to this, but it is important that we not displace these bigger questions with smaller ones – those that can be answered with meaningless nameplates and hollow matter. Do not seek such validation. Do not resign your identity to what it says on a business card. Instead, seek truth and meaning and keep trying to reach a grander sense of purposiveness or understanding. The closer you come to it, the less you necessitate such vainer pursuits to imbue you with significance.

Anjalie Tandon wants to guide you through your next existential crisis and help you realize that money and titles don’t have to be the foundation of your identity.

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