5 Basic Strategies to Build a Purposeful and Meaningful Life
The pursuit of happiness is a concept that is known to almost all of us. Happiness is considered as the ultimate goal of life. While there isn’t much room to argue with that, there are certain mini-objectives that pave the way to achieve true happiness. What’s unfortunate is that the majority of us focus on getting to our destination i-e happiness, but fail to realize the importance of these objectives which make up this greater goal. If you are looking for true happiness in your life and are interested to know more about its components, each of which can be achieved individually, then we are glad that you landed on this page.
Be it the perspective of psychology or philosophy, it has been established that wishing for a happier life without having a meaning or purpose is like stepping into a battleground with hopes of winning the war while forgetting to bring the weapons. You can consider happiness as an ocean while having a meaningful or purposeful life is like the smaller streams which ultimately empty into this ocean of happiness.
A lack of meaning or purpose in your life doesn’t only lead to boredom, but it eventually disables you from seeing value in your personal as well as your professional life. You lose the energy to focus on the important tasks of your routine and eventually end up with a negative vibe in general. It has also been proven with research that a lack of meaning and purpose in life can translate into higher levels of stress, mood swings, anxiety, depression, and a range of other common mental disorders.
Now that you have been briefed about the importance of having a meaning and purpose in your life, it is time to inform you about the simple strategies that you can adopt today to build a purposeful and meaningful life.
1. You Need To Have A Sense Of Belonging
One of the most important aspects of building a meaningful life is to have a sense of belonging. Remember that we the social animals. It is impossible for us to find meaning in a vacuum. It is our social connections, the intricacies of our personal and professional lives which enables us to have a sense of belonging. Yes, it’s true. Your sense of belonging is not confined to your friends and family, it does also engage your professional relations and how you connect with your colleagues and your workplace in general.
Finding a sense of belonging is of paramount importance for having a purpose in your life. If you are not being accepted by your so-called folks for who you are, it’ll only get harder for you to fit in there. Everyone makes an effort to contribute to his surroundings and it is only humane to look for recognition and appreciation for the part that you play. Failure to have it reciprocated puts you at the risk of losing the sense of belonging that eventually blinds you of the meaning and purpose of life and severely damages the overall quality of life.
A word of advice: if you feel like you don’t belong in an environment or with certain people, it’s probably time for you to move on to the next chapter of your life. There are billions of people on the planet. You don’t have to try and force yourself into being content with something that you don’t have a connection with. Once you get a sense of belonging, you’d be able to see how meaningful and purposeful your life is and that you are indeed surrounded by the happiness that you were too blind to see earlier.
2. What Is It That You Are Looking Forward To?
[restrict]In order to build a meaningful life, it is important to have a purpose that is greater than yourself. If you can’t associate a purpose to your life, sooner or later, things will start to appear meaningless and you will lose the will to be optimistic. Consider an example of playing an engaging video game that has certain missions which you need to clear in order to be the winner. Now once you have completed all the missions, you can still log into the game but there isn’t anything in particular that you have to do. You can roam around the map and try some random activities, but none of them are associated with a purpose anymore. How long do you think you’d be able to play the same game without the missions? Was it more interesting when it had a mission or do you enjoy it better now when you don’t have anything to do in it? The reason why your answer is the former is that we are attuned to be interested in growth. It is imperative for us to see that we are not just standing still but are indeed moving forward. This is why a single goal for your life is not sufficient. You need to plan them one after the other, just so you can keep the ball rolling.
Our lives are much like this video game as well. In order to be engaged and get the most out of your life, you need to have missions, purpose, or goals, one after the other. A few of the common goals that people use as anchors include getting a degree, getting a job, getting married and having a family. Raising children, for example, is an impeccable purpose for life as it gives you an opportunity to get out of yourself and take responsibility for another person. The process is not always convenient, the terrain can get pretty rough along the way, but there’s always a sense of duty, a meaning, and a purpose that you can derive from it. Therefore, if you are looking to build a purposeful and meaningful life, now is your time to sit and ask, “What is it that I’m looking forward to in my life?” If you fail to come up with a response immediately, it is time that you redefined the purpose of your life.
3. Live In The Present
Often times, it is hard to concentrate on the meaning and purpose of your life because your mind is wandering in the thoughts of the past or the future. It is an inherent nature of the mind to be a nomad. If it was entirely up to him, it would spend half the day overanalyzing the past experience and the other half overthinking about what is yet to come. Creating a barricade for the mind to be lost in the pool of disturbing thoughts is what is required to build a meaningful and purposeful life that is aimed at achieving true happiness. For example, if your mind is overly tuned to the thought of death, it is unlikely to find value or meaning in anything that is happening in the present. Meditation and mindfulness practices are highly effective in collecting your focus from the thoughts of the past and the panic of the future and bringing it entirely to one single event that is happening in the present. The event could be a soothing symphony that is entering your ears, or perhaps a peaceful scenery that your eyes are witnessing. Once the focus is entirely brought to the present moment with meditation, it leaves no room for the mind to be troubled by the unnecessary thoughts which open it up to the meaning and purpose of life. With sharper focus and clarity of vision, it enables you to see the value in what’s happening, why is it happening, and how does it fit with the story of your life.
4. Simplicity Is The Best Policy
It’s ironic that the life in the year 2019 is so much more complicated as compared to the lives of our forefathers. Science tells us that the advancements our human race has made in the previous 100 years are greater than the advancements we made since the start of civilizations. There are plenty of new devices, gadgets, robots, etc. which are being released in the market every year with claims of making lives more convenient and efficient. And yet, a deeper analysis of our minds would exhibit unfathomable complications.
It might be an unorthodox opinion, but the key to building a purposeful and meaningful life is to make life simpler. It is understandable for you to find more peace and meaning to your life if you were spending a good part of your day doing something that genuinely fulfills you, something that offers a sense of satisfaction, something that you love doing, in simpler words. Make sure that you are not being so lost in the fast pace of this era that you fail to find time for yourself. Go read that book that has been sitting in your shelf for a month, watch that movie you’ve been telling yourself that I’ll watch on Sunday for God knows how many weeks, take that vacation with your family that you have been planning for two years. It’s okay for you to switch jobs even if the new one pays less as long as you love the work that you do. You’ll have to experience it to believe that your satisfaction is way more important than your salary. It’s time that you pull yourself out of the petty complications of what other people would think of you. It’s your life, it’s your decision. Take charge today.
5. Go Beyond Yourself
Last but not the least in our list of building a meaningful and purposeful life is the experience of going beyond yourself. The moment that you start to see that you are indeed a part of something larger than life is the moment when you embrace satisfaction and associate a greater purpose to your life. Having the ability to see beyond one’s own self is a humbling yet inspiring experience. There are plenty of ways in which you can connect with something greater than yourself. In order to get a glimpse of what we mean, go out in the night and look up at the stars. Try to imagine how many of them there are in the sky, focus on being a single entity on a planet with billions of people while there are other planets in the solar system. Focus on the fact that ours is perhaps not the only galaxy out there. Go to the beach and sit by the side of the ocean and focus on its vastness. Such experiences of connecting with something beyond ourselves are enlightening in terms of giving meaning and purpose to your life. Different people find this connection in different things. Some would find it in the religion where they can connect with an Almighty, others would find it in compassion, others still, would see it in meditation, fasting, or prayer. Whatever works for you. The point is to transcend and see beyond yourself.
Conclusion
It is well beyond your power to decide on the number of years that you will live for. But the quality of your life that you’d be able to experience, that is certainly an aspect that is under your command. There are people who live an ordinary life, and then there are those who leave their marks. The difference is that of living a purposeful life. If you are one of those people who want to leave a legacy behind, now is your time to take action and make your life more meaningful and purposeful. These are the two essential ingredients of happiness which is your ultimate goal in life. So, what are you waiting for? We have mentioned the simplest of all strategies which you can implement to build a purposeful life. Don’t be overwhelmed, though. It’s not a competition. You can take them at your own pace. You just have to start somewhere. Start with two, even just one of these tips for that matter. Once you start to see the positive change in your life, you’d be convinced to adopt the other strategies as well. [/restrict]
