There's an idea circulating with a lot of confidence today: that the universe has no purpose at all, that we're a chemical accident among billions of chemical accidents, and that any meaning we feel is just the brain inventing a story to feel better. It's a serious idea, discussed by serious people. And yet almost no one actually lives as if they believed it.

I notice this constantly. The same people who say life has no meaning still wake up early to care for someone, still get upset over injustice, still try to leave some kind of mark before they die. If life really were indifferent, none of that would make sense. And yet it does, for practically everyone.

The problem might not be a lack of purpose, but too many small options competing for the place of one big one. Work, consumption, approval, entertainment: each promises a piece of meaning, none delivers enough, and we spend our lives trading one for another without noticing.

There's an old, simple answer to this question, one that doesn't depend on convincing anyone through fear or guilt: the idea that we were made to recognize something greater than ourselves, not to serve it as slaves with no choice, but because that relationship, on its own, ends up organizing everything else. Work, pleasure, success still have a place. They just stop being the center.

This doesn't settle the question for good for someone who doesn't start from the same faith, and it shouldn't pretend to. But there's a point worth separating from the religious debate: even someone who completely rejects the idea of a creator still, in practice, organizes their life around something they treat as sacred. Family. Legacy. Justice. Art. No one really lives as if nothing mattered.

The difference usually isn't "having purpose or not." It's whether we look honestly at what we already treat as purpose, and ask whether it can bear all the weight we're putting on it.

I'll admit I also go through stretches where the day-to-day swallows the bigger question: I get up, work, answer messages, and weeks pass without me asking why again. What brings me back usually isn't an argument. It's something simple (a prayer said with more attention, a conversation, a loss) that reminds me the question never actually disappeared, it just moved to the background.

The search for purpose might never get resolved once and for all. It's more like breathing, something done continuously, not just once. Have you found a purpose, or are you still looking?