what is your purpose?

[WaterWizard]

As we grow to adulthood, we often start fleshing out our raisons d'etre. Have you found yours? If so, what is it?

Furthermore,

Does this purpose influence your actions or is it merely abstract?
Do you think your raison d'etre might change in the future?
What life events and information influenced the formulation of your purpose?

These are some questions I have!

WW

[garrinred]

Well, I'm a Christian, meaning a follower of Jesus Christ. That is my raison d'etre.

This purpose absolutely influences my actions. It affects not only my major future plans, but also how I live my everyday life. Some of these influneces are obvious: Here at college I live in a house with other Christian students who want to live in intentional community with each other. I lead a small group bible study, and serve as the president of a Christian student fellowship. I pray daily, alone and with others, and I read and study the Bible regularly. Other influences are not as obvious: Since finding this raison d'etre, I have become a better person in every way. I am a better friend, housemate, son, and brother, and I'm a much nicer person overall. I have discipline and motivation where before I didn't. I am more purposeful in how I choose to spend my time, and I spend far less time than I used to on things I consider to be entertaining and harmless but ultimately pointless(like video games). I have a relationships with my parents, and also with my friends. Overall I'm a lot happier.

I do not think my raison d'etre might change in the future. I think I will have this same raison d'etre for the rest of my life. The specifics might change as I learn more and understand more about what it truly means to follow Jesus, but I am confident my ultimate raison d'etre will remain the same.

This question is the most difficult to answer of the three. I grew up going to church, but by high school I had more or less turned atheist. I truly found God the summer before my senior year of high school. It happened while listening to a friend of mine tell her testimony, more or less her life story and why she believed what she did. I am not sure what happened, I don't even remember what she said, but I felt like at that moment my eyes were opened and I realized God existed. I understood then what Christianity was really all about at its core, and I knew that was how I wanted to live. Despite that awesome event though, God didn't really become my raison d'etre at that point. In fact, it didn't really impact my life very much at all. I spent all of senior year more or less the same as I had been before. At best, it was a vague abstract raison d'etre, a sort of "I believe this and living like this would be kind of cool.....or something". It was when I came to college that I really started to get serious about my faith. I was invited to a bible study, and started going every week. For the first time ever, I met people who were truly passionate about God. And they were my own age, too! It also helped that they were(still are!) the nicest group of people I had ever met. I had met individual nice people before, and I had some good friends throughout high school, but I'd never encountered such an awesome group of nice people. I saw, for the first time, what it really meant for someone to be passionate about God and to live out his or her faith. I also felt at home in a community for the first time. Lots of firsts that semester. I became a part of that community and started to get more serious about my faith personally as well. I started to pray. I bought a bible and started to read it. I came to bible study every week and participated in discussion. Sometime that winter I decided that yes, I really did believe in God and in Jesus, and yes, this is how I wanted to live. By spring semester I had become a leader-in-training with my bible study, and was given the fancy-sounding title of president of the entire fellowship(Actually at the time that meant nothing more than paperwork that none of the upperclassmen wanted to do and meetings they didn't want to go to. No actual decision-making at all). And that's where I was at the end of freshman year of college. Since then, there's been one more major turning point in my life that has influenced the formulation of my purpose. But that requires that we backtrack a little bit. Throughout my whole life, but especially in middle school and high school, I suffered from something that would probably be classified as a mental illness. I really don't want to go into specifics about it. But I do mean suffered. When I was around people, it wasn't usually visible, and I functioned more or less normally. But when I was alone, that's when I suffered. It especially affected my ability to do schoolwork, but it caused a lot of problems in a lot of areas. It was a problem whenever I tried to accomplish anything by myself, and whenever I was stressed about anything. I escaped my problems by playing video games and watching anime. Whenever I was alone and wasn't escaping though, I was suffering. By this past fall, sophomore year of college, it had become a massive problem. The most urgent part was I wasn't doing my schoolwork, so I was getting terrible grades, but my problem was affecting all areas of my life. It was very literally driving me insane. I had tried many many many times to "fix" my problems or to overcome them somehow, and I had always failed. I was on the brink of going insane, when one night I just broke down. I gave up. I realized that I was powerless to fix myself and I needed God to do it. I prayed for several hours, begging God to fix me, to heal me. The next few days and weeks are kind of a blur to me now. I don't really remember what happened or how it happened. I do remember that after that night, I wasn't going insane anymore. Some time later, my illness was gone. Just like that. It was just......gone. I don't remember how it happened. I didn't even notice the change at first. At one point I was like "Hey wait. It's....gone." The problems that had been plaguing me for most of my life were simply not there any more. I think I cried with joy. Imagine being an alcoholic for years and then realizing one day that you simply no longer crave alcohol any more, physically or psychologically. I've never been an alcoholic, but I imagine that's what my experience could be compared to. It did wonders for my faith, and changed my whole life. I was no longer depressed. I no longer had extreme stress. I could now function well alone, and I could accomplish things by myself. I didn't need to escape reality any more. It's not like every single bad thing in my life went away. I still had stress, and bad habits, and bad days, and struggles. But those felt like ordinary problems compared to the horrible ones I had before. And then all sorts of awesome things started happening. Strange "coincidences" happened left and right. Specific issues started being resolved soon after I prayed about them. etc. etc. etc. My faith grew by leaps and bounds. By the end of the semester, I was a completely different person. A much better and happier person. And I had decided to truly make God my one and only raison d'etre, to devote myself to Him entirely. And.....that's more or less where I am now. I'm in the second semester of my sophomore year of college. Things aren't quite as super-awesome as they were last semester, but they're still pretty great, and I'm still growing and changing for the better and a very fast pace. And....life is good.

So that's my raison d'etre and the story behind it. Sorry for the massive wall of text, but I figured I might as well give a complete answer to the question. So yeah. That's that.

[WaterWizard]

Thanks for sharing, Garrin! No need to apologize for the verbosity; I was hoping for substantial responses like that! I'll try to post mine soon.

[posthuman]

I'll post mine soon too.

[redemption]

My raison d'etre is to serve the Lord my God. I don't have the same shaping experiences Garrin has but I do have the Savior Christ the Lord dwelling within me. He shapes me, And I live for Him. I don't know how He will lead me in the years to come but I will follow his lead.

[LucasBM]

That's a tough question.

I am not so sure. At this moment, I have designed my life to conclude my studies at college. This means, I'm now trying to guarantee myself and my family a better life in the future. This is the way I head to, so I'd say this is my current raison d'etre.

As one day I hope to have settled my studies and have built (or at least started) a solid career, I will change my raison d'etre. In fact, I feel more comfortable this way than making myself a lifetime raison d'etre. It feels more objective, and I deal with this kind of things better than with subjective ones.

Some possible objectives are: getting a master's degree, working for the government/private enterprises, raising a family(who knows?).

The things I most take in account for stabilishing my goals are the welfare of the people I love and encountering estimulating challenges for my life.

Anyway, as long as I can be with the people I love, I'm a man getting ready for the next challenge. I also hope I can contribute for a healthy, honest environment, where I can teach and learn (from examples, specially) moral values like courage, friendship, dignity, self-acceptance, respect to differences and FREEDOM <3

Sorry if this is sounding a little bit confusing. It is a difficult question!

[cheese]

Purpose? I've no idea. In terms of religion I guess you could call me an agnostic, although I've rejected the idea of any kind of personal God.
What does that leave? Well I dunno really. I guess just standard stuff: have a lot of great experiences, learn things, share things with people. Be happy. Find love. Try not to hurt others too much. Stuff like that.

From a strictly biological point of view I guess my purpose is to reproduce and raise healthy kids, but it's a very shallow life if you allow it to be dictated by that. My actions aren't determined by some kind of overriding purpose, they're all specific to their consequence. If I eat, it's because I'm hungry. I know that probably makes me sound very mechanical, and obviously there are things that I do that I cannot explain exactly why, but I can't find any other explanation to my "purpose" or how this would affect the actions in my life as a whole. Sometimes my actions are based on a need to survive, sometimes they're influenced by past experiences, sometimes curiosity, but I don't see an overriding "thing" that would generally influence my behavior. Who knows though, maybe I will in the future.

[jorgen]

I am a perfunctory organism whose purpose is to carry out the biological imperative dictated by my genes, i.e., to preserve my genetic information by passing on as many copies of it as possible.

That's why I play Pokemon on the internet. Lets me pick up so many chicks I barely know what to do with them all.

Seriously, though, at this point I've decided to not take life so seriously. I do what I can to tickle my curiosity and altruism bugs, but I ultimately feel that it's for a sense of satisfaction that cannot be obtained through simple hedonism. If I try to assign my efforts to a greater purpose than that, I likely end up ruining myself with a burden that either paralyzes me or stresses me out Schindler-style for failing to meet unrealistic criteria.

[LucasBM]

I think jorgen's and cheese's answers kind of complement my own.

[garrinred]

Redemption, tell me more. :-)