On Purpose
My sweet son has been writing almost every night. He has his journal and writes letters to his friends about how important they are to him. He sends me messages in the middle of the night. This message arrived at 1:08 am on Thursday, the second day of April 2026.
Purpose.
“The reason for which something is done or created, or for which something exists.”
Humans seek purpose. We see it as a necessity.
“What is the purpose of life?” we often ask, constantly attempting to find a reason for our individual existences.
The most common argument for purpose comes from religion. That God created us, that our purpose is to devote ourselves to Him or follow His teachings.
I do not think this is the case.
Rather, I believe everything to be purposeless.
The cosmos, our lives, our deaths - all without “purpose.”
There is no reason for anything, for you or me, the sky and the earth.
We simply are.
This notion goes against our very core ideas of life, however, consider but for a moment:
There is beauty in something without purpose, because it is truly free.
A purpose is no different from shackles on your feet. A purpose drags you in a singular direction, with no care for the possibilities which lie outside your reach.
To understand and embrace our inherent purposelessness is to award yourself the freedom to pursue the many possibilities available to us in our temporal existence.
So cast away the chains of false purpose and be free. Free to do anything. Free to simply be.
This message was sent to me Sunday March 29th at 2:42 AM:
Today I taught Isaac to ride a bike. No matter who he becomes, where he goes, or what he does - I will forever have taught him to ride a bike one Saturday night.
How is the worth of one's life measured?
By the things we do for ourselves? How rich and successful we become?
I think not.
Instead, the true value of a life comes from what we do for others.
To bring joy into people’s lives is a self renewing blessing not just to them - but to the whole world. happiness is a gift which continues to give long after it was given.
Isaac will one day teach his child to ride a bike, and whether he remembers the moment in which I taught him matters not.
For the joy ushered into our world is what truly matters.
I care not for the legacy, the recognition, or the fame. I simply care that my actions have brought - and will continue to bring delight and triumph into the lives of others.
This Message was sent on Thursday March 26th at 1:37 ante meridiem:
Upon a long walk late at night, my dad and I talked. we spoke about much, but during our discussion an exclamation burst forth from my soul. A truth I was not yet aware of.
“I do not fear death, for if I were to die tomorrow, I would die happy, knowing that I have lived a good life.”
I believe this to be true. In my life, short as it has been, I have felt many things.
I have felt innumerable joys,
I have felt exultant triumph,
I have felt deepest despair,
I have felt peace and contentment.
I have felt fearful and nervous,
I have felt betrayal,
I have felt trust,
I have felt love for others,
And I myself have felt loved.
I have done no less than I have felt.
I have seen many beautiful places,
I have befriended many amazing people,
I have created many marvelous things,
I have made others cry tears of joy and sorrow,
I have explored what the world has to offer,
and I have subsequently made the world a better place.
I am grateful for the life I have lived so far. I look forward with joy to the life I will continue to live, for I will be living more than most, as I am free from the fear of death. A fear which prevents many from truly living.
These messages from my son, Cotton, fill me with such pride and happiness as I awaken. His mind and heart are blossoming in such regal glory. It makes me so happy he is at Bowdoin and surrounded by things which inspire him and for which he seems truly grateful. I responded to this message asking him to "remember this feeling my son when you are wanting, when you are sad, and remember the wondrous reward for gratitude is happiness.”
His most recent message about purpose and religion was sent a few days after I visited on Tuesday night and had dinner with him and his friends Ferris & Tyler. Ferris launched right into a question about Tyler’s faith and Cotton introduced the concept that perhaps God was the laws of physics. We talked about the pragmatists and about the Big Bang.
This notion of Purpose has consumed much of my thinking about my own life the past few years. The inner conflict arose when I first started reading David Deida’s The Way of the Superior Man. It is the subject of several of the book’s short chapters:
11 - IF YOU DON’T KNOW YOUR PURPOSE, DISCOVER IT, NOW
Without a conscious life-purpose a man is totally lost, drifting, adapting to events rather than creating events. Without knowing his life-purpose a man lives a weakened, impotent existence, perhaps eventually becoming even sexually impotent, or prone to mechanical and disinterested sex.
The core of your life is your purpose. Everything in your life, from your diet to your career, must be aligned with your purpose, your deepest desire, then the secret of success is to discipline your life so that you support your deepest purpose and minimize distraction and detours.
But if you don’t know your deepest desire, then you can’t align your life to it. Everything in your life is dissociated from your core. You go to work, but since it’s not connected to your deepest purpose, it is just a job, a way to earn money. You go through your daily round with your family and friends, but each moment is just another in a long string of moments, going nowhere, not inherently profound.
Disconnected from your core, you feel weak. This empty feeling will undermine not only your “erection” in the world, but your erection with your woman, too.
However, when you know your true purpose, which is your core desire in life, each moment can become a full expression of your core desire. Every instant of career, every instant of intimacy, is filled with the power of your heart purpose. You are no longer just going through the motions at work and with your woman, but you are living the truth of your life, and giving the gifts of your love, moment by moment. Such a life is complete unto itself in every instant.
The superior man is not seeking for fulfillment through work and woman, because he is already full. For him, work and intimacy are opportunities to give his gifts, and be vanished in the bliss of giving.
5 - ALWAYS HOLD TO YOUR DEEPEST REALIZATION
Eternity must be a man’s home, moment by moment. Without it, he is lost, always striving, grasping at puffs of smoke. A man must do anything necessary to glimpse, and then stabilize, this every-fresh realization, and organize his life around it.
Make your life an ongoing process of being who you are, at your deepest, most easeful levels of being. Everything other than this process is secondary. Your job, your children, your wife, your money, your artistic creations, your pleasures–they are all superficial and empty, if they are not floating in the deep sea of your conscious loving. How many hours today was your attention focused in the realm of changes–on events, people, thoughts, and experiences–and how often was your attention relaxed into its source? Where is your attention right now? Can you feel its source? Even for a moment, can you feel that which makes attention conscious and aware? Can you feel the deepest nature of attention? What happens when you simply, effortlessly, allow attention to subside into its source?
This source is never changing and always present. It is the constant silent tone behind and pervading the music of life. Feel into this source as deeply as possible, and then re-approach your work, intimacy, family, and creative efforts. When you make money, make money from this source. Find out what happens to the details of your life when you live more consistently from this source. Use aids to support your relaxation into, and creation from, this source. Read books that remind you of who you are, in truth. Spend time with people who inspire and reflect the source to you. Meditate, contemplate, or pray daily so that you steep yourself in the source.
If you are like most men, you have strong habits that rivet your attention to the events and tasks of the day. Days and nights fly by for years , and life slips through your fingers, your attention absorbed in the seeming world of necessary responsibilities. But all of it is empty if we do not live our responsibilities as expressions of our depth of being and heart-truth.
Know eternity. Do whatever it takes. And from the depth of being, live the details of your life. But if you postpone the process of submerging yourself in the source for the sake of taking care of business first, your life will be spent in hours and days of business, and then it will be gone. Only if you are well grounded in that which is larger than life will you be able to play life with humor, knowing that each task is a mirage of necessity.
Even if you find yourself in some trivial moment, watching TV or cleaning up a mess in the kitchen, feel the truth of who you are. Feel the boundless cognizance in which each instant seems and vanishes. All moments are the same intensity of clarity, completeness, and humor when you meet each moment with your deepest realization. Nothing that has ever happened has made any difference to the One who you are.
There are many other chapters that tie to this idea of a man’s masculine core being his natural directionality or his purpose and that harmony, happiness and success in relationships and sexuality comes from being in touch with and expressing one’s realization of oneself. He points to this in chapters such as Your Purpose Must Come Before Your Relationship and She Doesn’t Really Want to Be Number One. And he provides guidelines for how to stay true to this way of being in the first part of the Book dubbed “A MAN’S WAY” with the imperatives that a man should Stop Hoping for a Completion of Anything in Life, and that he should Live As If Your Father Were Dead, Be Willing to Change Everything in Your Life, and that you should Lean Just Beyond Your Edge.
This book came to me as recommended reading from the marriage counselor, Dr. Ron who I was seeing at the time. It is premised on the idea that in the modern world many relationships have become ‘depolarized’ with roles unclear and the resulting consequence is lack of passion and unhappiness. The idea that a man without a purpose was a shell and unrealized resonated with me because I felt adrift. My mission had been to live the life of my father in my own way. It was my purpose to have a son. And I was going to give that boy a mother and a home and freedom from poverty. All three of these things were completely intertwined. When I first read David Deida, I felt like I had been “taking care of business first” and then it was suddenly gone. I felt like my goals had been achieved, and also that I had been pursuing the goals of others rather than doing what it was I really wanted. I felt I must submerge myself in the ‘source’ and find my purpose and reason.
Later as I read Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, which predates the contemporary Dieda’s 1997 book by nearly forty years, he examined the idea of ‘equality’ in religion. We are “all God’s children, that we all share in the same human-divine substance, that we are all one. It meant also that the very differences between individuals must be respected, that while it is true that we are all one, it is also true that each one of us is a unique entity, is a cosmos by itself.” Fromm quickly follows the concept through the Enlightenment to his mid-century time:
In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means “sameness,” rather and “oneness.” It is the sameness of abstractions, of men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas. . . . Equality is bought at this very price: women are equal because they are not different any more. The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, l’âme n’a pas de sexe, the soul has no sex, has become the general practice. The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary society itself preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without friction; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called “equality.”
‘Oneness,’ rather than equality, is for Fromm the primary quest of man. It is evidenced in his exercise of the various types of love: Brothery, Motherly, Erotic, Self-Love & Love of God. It is the consequence of consciousness.
Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself; he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of the future. This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and aghast his will he dies, that he will die before those who he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.
The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is indeed, the source for all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world–things and people–actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness is the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. This experience of guilt and shame in separateness is expressed in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. After Adam and Eve have eaten of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” after they have disobeyed (there is no good and evil unless there is freedom to disobey), after they have become human by having emancipated themselves from the original animal harmony with nature, i.e., after their birth as human beings–they saw “that they were naked–and they were ashamed.” . . . . (A)fter man and woman have become aware of themselves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness, and of their difference, inasmuch as they belong to different sexes. But while recognizing their separateness they remain strangers, because they have not yet learned to love each other. . . . The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love–is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.
Guilt, anxiety, remorse, or more specifically the lack thereof, is the quality of Meursault, the central figure in Albert Camus The Stranger, that ultimately alienates him and dooms him. Meursault, who shows an unacceptable lack of empathy and grief at the loss of his mother to those around him, ultimately is imprisoned for the murder of an Arab and the prosecutor at his trial observes that “we cannot blame him for this. We cannot complain that he lacks what is not in his power to acquire. But here in this court the wholly negative virtue of tolerance must give way to the sterner but loftier virtue of justice. Especially when the emptiness of a man’s heart becomes, as we find it has in this man, an abyss threatening to swallow up society.”
Meursault lingers in his prison cell thinking about his love Marie, his appeal and the early morning ligh–things that kept his heart in touch with joy. “I would always begin by assuming the worst: my appeal was denied. ‘Well, so I am going to die.’ Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn’t worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn’t much matter whether you die at thirty or seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living–and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying.”
In the final days of his life, Meursault consents to see the Chaplain who desperately tries to bring forward the shame and guilt that precede remorse and make him aware of the “burden of sin” from which he must free himself. Meurasult becomes angry with the Chaplain. “I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
I was pouring out everything that was in my heart, cries of anger and cries of joy. He seemed so certain about everything didn’t he? And yet none of his certainties was worth one hair of a woman’s head. He wasn’t even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who’d come up emptyhanded. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me. I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so? It was as if I had waited all this time for this moment and for the first light of this dawn to be vindicated. Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Through the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
It is the freedom from guilt that comes in the acceptance of our temporality and the meaninglessness of the world that Camus posits as the goal of life, or perhaps the only sense one can have of fulfillment. There is no need to find meaning or rationalize our existence, only we must find happiness and live in spite of the absurdity of the world around us. Nothing matters in his world, how one lives, what one does, it has no impact on the inevitability of death. In this we are all the same, we are all equal. So many of our emotions, the constructs of society, ideas of justice and the divine fall away when we let go of the belief that things have a reason and things happen for a purpose. There is still fear, but no anxiety.
This is the opposite of the self-help advice of Deida that one must find and live their own reason and purpose in doing so one lives as one’s authentic self. Reason and purpose, especially when there is freedom to create one’s own unique life, is what gives us hope in Existentialism and what makes the Absurdism of Camus uncomfortable for many. Even though Camus’ tale posits a meaninglessness and fatalism to existence, it does still square with the fundamental need of human beings to find love and oneness as described by Fromm:
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling of separation disappears–because the world outside, from which one is separated, has disappeared.
Man–of all ages and cultures–is confronted with the solution of one and the same question: the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one’s own individual life and find at-onement. . . . The question is the same, for it springs from the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of human existence. The answer varies. . . . The history of religion and philosophy is the history of these answers, of their diversity, as well as of their limitation in number.
Indeed the overwhelming sense I get when reading the midnight musings of my son at this time is that he will find his way to the Eastern answers and way soon. The Western forms of religion are steeped in the ideas of equality or ‘sameness’ in that we are separated from the Divine in our sin and guilt and this is what defines our humanity and also our free-will. In Cotton’s words I sense that he is stepping on clouds, unentangled, giving his love as freely as he is able. In his teaching and loving of others he has found the oneness of being that has given him a sense of transcendence freeing him from the need to assign a storyline to his life or higher meaning to his existence. He isn’t bogged down in the fatalistic and absurd pointlessness of Camus because Cotton in his world seeking purpose is not the outcome of Reason.
Coleridge’s answer to what is Reason was thus:
Whene’er the mist, that stands ‘twixt God and thee,
Defecates to a pure transparency,
That intercepts no light and adds no stain–
There Reason is, and then begins her reign!
But alas!
–”tu stesso, ti fai grosso
Col Falso immaginar, si che non vedi
Ciò che verdresti, se l’avessi scosso.”
The last lines are a quote from Dante’s Paradiso, Canto L, and roughly translate to “You make yourself dull / With false imagining so that you do not see / what you would see, if you had shaken it off.” My own instinctual reaction to the idea that our lives have no purpose was to reject this assessment as the by-product of my son’s youth. To reason it away as the naive freedom of a young man who doesn’t yet understand the oneness of humanity and of family and of love. And what has my life taught me about all that? I hoped that in my own life, I would discover a new purpose and meaning after realizing the one that came before. Deida used the layers of an onion analogy to describe this ebb and flow in a man’s life and the times between purposes that exist. Deida also essentially defines the very essence of masculinity as purposefulness, creating the unfortunate consequence of emasculation without direction.
Death, separateness, and the dark wind of Camus that transcends time create fear and anxiety for Man. Openness, oneness, connecting with the eternal, or for Cotton, embracing the possibilities that exist beyond your reach through the freedom of purposelessness are the reason and reward of life. I am living a chapter of my life in which I seek to be humble, to appreciate the joys of doing the dishes and dancing in the freedom of those moments when I feel my own authenticity. I am humbled when I awake and read the words of my 18-year old son and wonder how it is that he has become so wise. I know I do not have the same fearlessness and acceptance and freedom and may never, for the very thought of being separated from him paralyzes me and fills my eyes with tears.
KNOW THE MALE
Know the male, keep the female;
be humble toward the world.
Be humble to the world,
and eternal power never leaves,
returning again to innocence.
Knowing the white, keep the black,
be an exemplar for the world.
Be an exemplar for the world,
and eternal power never goes awry,
returning again to infinity.
Knowing the glorious, keep the ignominious,
be open to the world.
Be open to the world,
and eternal power suffices,
returning again to simplicity.
Simplicity is lost to make instruments,
which sages employ as functionaries.
Therefore the great fashioner does no splitting.
Tao Te Ching
References:
Cotton Schlaver, Text Messages to his Father. 2026
David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man. Pages 23-38 & 23-24, Sounds True, 2007
Erick Fromm, The Art of Loving. pg 14, 15-16, 8-9, & 9-10. Harper Colophone, 1956
Albert Camus, The Stranger. pgs 100-101 & 120-121 Vintage International 1988
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “REASON”, Poetry and Prose page 137. Bantam 1965
Tao Te Ching, pg 22.Shambhala 2003