Finding Purpose in Learning: Reframing the Relationship between Work and Life

I had been grappling with a question that many of us pose at some point in our lives, a question that I suspect we often confront more frequently than we care to admit. The question is, “Is this what I should be doing with my life?”

It is not a question of whether we find pleasure in the daily grind, or whether we’re surrounded by people we like or the company and industry we find ourselves in. It’s about the larger picture, about who we are and what we want to do with the time we’ve been given. It’s a question of fundamental self-understanding, and by its very nature, difficult to answer; as we, in essence, use a lifetime to answer it.

But it’s easy to confuse this question with another, simpler one: whether we like our job. It is human nature to want to find meaning in the things we do. After all, isn’t work a major aspect of what we do with our lives? Shouldn’t it, at the very least, represent some part of who we are when we invest so much time and energy into it? This tendency to conflate the two areas is perhaps why the concept of ‘purpose’ in the context of work has become so prevalent in recent years. We are told to define the purpose of our lives and expect companies and organizations to have one, and to work where the two match. Or the idea of “quiet quitting”, where we treat work as merely that, as opposed to treating it like a measuring stick of our lives' worth and going above and beyond to prove it so to others. We would not be quietly quitting if we did not expect more than the basics from work, to begin with.

And because it’s easy to mix up our sense of purpose with our job, it’s a tricky question to admit to ourselves. After all, we applied for this job; we listed all the reasons we wanted it and liked it. To then acknowledge to ourselves that we might not be satisfied might make us feel like we’ve made a mistake, and nobody wants to feel like a failure. But the thing is, the question is a lot bigger than just our job. It’s about our entire lives.

But perhaps we should be asking ourselves a different question. Instead of seeking the “right” job, we could focus on the opportunities that arise in a job. If the type of job you have is by choice, instead of treating it as a means for self-actualization, we could reframe it as a medium to learn about the outside world and how it works (I call it Type 1 knowledge as opposed to Type 2 knowledge, which concerns the inner world - the self). And when I began to reframe my thinking in this way, the tension I had been feeling about work and life dissipated. It helped me to reframe the question, “What job should I be doing?” into “What do I want to learn about?” and “Where and how can I get that opportunity?”

Coming back to the question then, the answer I was struggling to admit to myself was “likely not”, and that is fine for now. I am relieved of the burden of trying to answer the enormous question of what, then, I should be doing with my life. Instead, I am excited about the possibilities for learning that lie ahead. And that is enough to get me going. And that, I have come to realize, is maybe, what I should be doing with my life after all: learning.