If I’ve been asked this once, I’ve been asked it a thousand times.
In 2025, Pew Research Center found that 46% of U.S. adults think about the meaning and purpose of life at least once a week, and another 38% think about it monthly or yearly (Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study, February 2025). So the question is close to universal. What’s less common is a straight answer that isn’t just “follow your passion.”
Here’s mine, and it isn’t the one most people want.
Key Takeaways – In 2025, Pew found 46% of U.S. adults think about life’s meaning and purpose at least weekly. – Your purpose isn’t a career, a role or an identity. Those can give you a sense of purpose. They aren’t it. – Chasing purpose is what prevents you from being in it, for the same reason staring at a pen doesn’t make it drop. – Being in your purpose is learning from what happens to you and then actually acting on what you learned.
Why does this question feel so urgent?
Because for a lot of people it’s tied to their worth. In 2025, Pew found only 15% of U.S. adults say they seldom or never think about the meaning of life (Pew Research Center, February 2025). The rest of us are circling it, and some of us circle it constantly.
If you relate to being the chronic overfunctioner, the overachiever, the one who carries the emotional load for everybody, then your biggest struggle in life is learning to detach your worth and your value from your productivity and from what you can bring to the table.
That’s why this question comes up so often with my clients specifically. The motivating factor for your entire life has been to find purpose, to find worth, to prove it. And to assume all of that comes from something outside yourself.
More on that pattern: why being the strong one is exhausting.
Why isn’t your purpose a job or a role?
Because a role is something you do, and purpose is something you are. When people hear the word purpose, their mind goes immediately to an identity or a career.
Is my purpose to be a doctor and save lives? To be a coach and help people heal? To be a mother, a father?
The hard truth is that none of those things are your purpose.
They can absolutely give you a sense of purpose. They can be genuine passions. But if your purpose were your job, you’d lose your purpose the day you changed careers, retired, or got made redundant. Most people who’ve been through that already know it doesn’t work that way.
So what is your purpose?
To be here, and to grow from what happens to you. In 2023, Pew Research Center found 83% of U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body (Pew Research Center, Spirituality Among Americans, December 2023). This answer follows from that.
I believe we’re souls who come into these lifetimes in physical bodies in order to grow, and that the only way we grow is by overcoming challenges.
So the discomfort in your life, the micro and macro traumas, are all here for your evolution.
That is your purpose. Every single person on this planet has the same one: to just be. The work is in learning to be. The work is in learning to accept that everything happening to you is happening for you, in your personal, spiritual and emotional growth.
You don’t need to go outside yourself looking for it. Challenges arrive on their own. Tension, conflict, struggle in relationships, loss. Your purpose is to learn how to feel them and process them, so you can overcome them and return to a higher truth of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance.
I’ll be honest that this is the hardest thing to grasp, because it runs against what we’re all conditioned to believe on a societal scale: that your purpose is to contribute, to fix, to bring something to the table.
Why does chasing purpose stop you finding it?
Because you’re focusing on the effect instead of the cause. This is the clearest way I’ve found to explain it, and I use it with clients constantly.
Cause and effect is a universal law. Every cause creates an effect. Now picture me holding a pen.
I want the pen to fall. So I focus hard on it: I want the pen to fall, I want the pen to fall, I want the pen to fall. Nothing happens. What am I missing?
Letting go. The second I focus on letting go, the pen falls.
When you focus on the effect, the effect diminishes, because the effect is a byproduct of the cause. If you want to be in your purpose, you have to stop focusing on finding purpose. Searching outside yourself for it means focusing on the outcome, and the outcome can’t happen because there’s no cause creating it.
Come back to the cause. Your true purpose here is to be.
What does being in your purpose actually look like?
It looks like paying attention, and then doing something. Not thinking about doing something.
It starts when you tune into your emotions and your lessons, take radical accountability and radical responsibility for what’s happening in your life and what it’s trying to teach you, and then actually implement it.
When I say implement, I mean stop talking about it and start doing it.
Across roughly 2,500 one-to-one sessions over four years, this is where almost everyone gets stuck. Not at understanding. At acting.
Why is the gap between knowing and doing so painful?
Because that gap is where the suffering lives. It’s the single line from my work I’d most want you to keep.
The space between knowing and doing is where suffering breeds.
“I know I need to have the hard conversation, but I’m going to put it off until I’m ready.” You’re never going to feel ready, and you’ll suffer a million times over in the meantime.
The universe didn’t create this experience so you could say “I have all this anxiety because of what happened in my childhood, and that’s just who I am now. End of story.”
When you say instead: I know why I’m this way, and I also know why I want to change and what I need to do to feel different, and then you start taking micro steps toward that, that is you being in your purpose.
Not the destination. The micro steps.
What does this have to do with other people?
More than you’d think, and you don’t have to try. Every single person on this planet is both a student and a teacher.
Just like the law of cause and effect, you only need to focus on being the student. You’re the teacher innately, as a byproduct.
Here’s how that works in practice. Say you notice you’ve been projecting onto people that they take too much, that they’re takers, when actually you have a lack of boundaries. You believed boundaries were bad because of something that happened in childhood. Now you know they aren’t, and you start setting them.
Somebody else who’s afraid to set boundaries sees you doing it. It either inspires them or it triggers them. Either way they’re learning from it, not because you sat them down to teach them, but because you allowed yourself to be a student of life, understood what your patterns were teaching you, and acted on it.
That is what it means to be in your purpose.
Where does a reading fit into this?
It shortens the part where you can’t see the pattern. That’s the honest scope of it, and it isn’t a shortcut past the work.
Most people arrive able to describe a situation but not the structure underneath it. A session identifies whether something is an incident or a pattern, and where the pattern came from.
What it can’t do is take the micro steps for you. I cannot promise outcomes. I give guidance that you have to implement to receive results.
For the full picture: what a mediumship reading is, and what a medium can and cannot promise.
If this landed
I talk about this in more depth on The Wild Soul Rising Podcast, including a full episode on why your purpose isn’t a job.
If you’d rather work through your own pattern directly, the easiest place to start is a free call.
Book a free 15-minute discovery call
Frequently Asked Questions
What is my purpose in life?
To be here and grow from what happens to you, rather than to occupy a particular role. In 2025, Pew found 46% of U.S. adults think about this at least weekly (Pew, February 2025). A career can give you a sense of purpose, but it isn’t your purpose, or you’d lose it when the job ended.
Why can’t I figure out my purpose?
Usually because you’re looking for it outside yourself, which focuses on the effect rather than the cause. Focus hard on a pen and it won’t fall; focus on letting go and it does. Purpose works the same way. Come back to being a student of what’s already happening to you.
Is my career my purpose?
No. Careers, roles and relationships can all give you a sense of purpose and can be real passions. They aren’t the thing itself. In 2023, Pew found 83% of U.S. adults believe people have a soul or spirit (Pew, December 2023); on that view, purpose sits underneath the role, not in it.
What if I know what I should do but can’t do it?
That’s the most common place to be stuck, and it’s the most painful. The space between knowing and doing is where suffering breeds. Waiting to feel ready extends the suffering. Micro steps taken before you feel ready are what being in your purpose actually looks like.
Can a mediumship reading tell me my purpose?
Not as a job title, no. A reading can show you the pattern you’re living in and where it came from, which is usually the thing you can’t see from inside it. It cannot promise outcomes, and it can’t take the steps for you.
The short version
Your purpose isn’t a career, a role or an identity. It’s to be here, to learn from what arrives, and to act on what you learn.
Chasing it is what stops you finding it. Let go of the outcome, come back to the cause, and take the micro step you already know you need to take.
Mediumship and intuitive coaching are not a substitute for medical care, mental health treatment, or professional therapy. If you are in crisis, please contact a licensed professional or your local emergency services.
Sources
- Pew Research Center, Religious Landscape Study: Spiritual Experiences, published 26 February 2025 (2023-24 Religious Landscape Study), retrieved 2026-08-04, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religious-landscape-study-spiritual-experiences/
- Pew Research Center, Spirituality Among Americans / Americans’ spiritual beliefs, published 7 December 2023, retrieved 2026-08-04, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-beliefs/
