what if purpose is the wrong question?
on purpose, lineage, and what self-help will never be able to tell you
Sitting by a window, watching leaves bob against the wind, I felt my spine straighten as a thought arrived: what if finding purpose isn’t what life is about?
My mind drifted, almost immediately, to a second question: what would my grandmother say?
She was a Peranakan woman, of mixed Chinese and Indonesian heritage, descended from early Chinese immigrants who settled in the Indonesian archipelago as far back as the 13th century. Born and raised in Java, through three hundred years of Dutch colonial rule and the Japanese occupation of the 1940s. Stoic. She had the kind of poise that never needed an explanation.
I imagine she would not have understood the question I carried. Not because she lacked wisdom, but in spite of it. What is your purpose? I can picture her, slightly disgruntled, sighing before letting her thoughts be known. I miss her presence.
The question of purpose is one I’ve been doing somersaults around since I can remember, and yet, ironically, one I’ve never honestly interrogated this deeply until now. It also happens to be among the most central and globally influential themes in modern Western thought, traceable at least as far back to Aristotle, whose concept of eudaimonia:flourishing or living well through virtuous action—named as the highest human good. The preoccupation with meaning was later deepened by existentialism and modern psychology, most famously in Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which argues that finding a personal “why” can be fundamental to survival itself.
For those of us navigating life across cultures, caught between who we are expected to be, who we want to be, and who we are still becoming, this examination isn’t philosophical. It’s personal. Lived inside every decision.
What if the framework we’ve built our lives around isn’t a universal truth, but belongs to a specific cultural moment instead? What if life is not meant to be organized around the self at all?
I was a teenager when The Secret became a global sensation. I read it the way you drink water: thirsty. It landed. Not only because it was loud, but because it felt familiar, though I hadn’t realized this at the time. Looking back, I see that it echoed scripture from the book of Matthews (7:7-8): ask and you shall receive. Rhonda Byrne’s three steps: ask, believe, receive, mirrored a language I already recognized.
Absorbing the wider cultural mood at the time, which I grew up in: a world that took the idea of purpose seriously. Personal desire and volition were about investing in your becoming. To name what you want and pursue it was the zeitgeist of the modern and ambitious person. To question it would have been to side with something that had no seat at the table.
Within that tradition, and in the context of my Christian upbringing, The Secret offered well-designed language to a primed receiver. It told me that the universe was oriented towards my desires, and I believed it. Not naively, but genuinely, the way you fall into a religion.
As I dove deeper into the self-help industrial complex, the movement also gave me vocabulary for feelings that had always lived in me underneath it all: a savior complex, or what’s also known as white knight syndrome. Defined by psychology as the compulsion to save, fix, or rescue others, while neglecting one’s own well-being. Driven by a need for validation or control; the first section to this designation was reflective of my situation.
I spent years at odds with this label, sometimes apologizing for it as though it were a defect in my character. There was an internal friction between what the world told me I should want: the accolades, the accomplishment, the validation, the purpose; and a quieter desire that persisted alongside it—I wanted to find my purpose to fulfill my duties for the world. To become my best, in order to give my best to others.
But labelling it a complex, implies confusion, a conflict of interest. The vocabulary made my orientation feel like a problem to resolve. Something in me, though, knew that diagnosis never felt right.
Like a whisper from the divine, as if my grandmother had walked into the room, I came across a Javanese principle I had only ever known by feeling, before I knew it by name: memayu hayuning bawana. To protect, refine, and beautify the beauty of the world.
If you’ve ever felt similar friction, between what the world handed you and what you’ve always carried underneath, this second half is for you. I’ll take you further into where my interrogations landed.
