Many money management programs, such as Your Money or Your Life, or The Simple Dollar’s 31 Days to Fix Your Finances, are at heart based on a simple premise:

Determine what your life purpose is, and spend money according to that.

But what happens when you can’t figure out what your life purpose is?

This is the place I’m in. This is why these programs always stump me.

I should probably qualify that as an atheist I don’t believe in a cosmically-ordained life purpose. But I do believe that we gain a lot of direction and meaning from establishing a life purpose based on our personal values and identity. And if I knew what those were, I’d be going there right now.

I feel like I’ve been playing with identity since I was first aware of what it was. Growing up, when identity was as simple as “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I never had a standard answer to give. One day I wanted to be a veterinarian; the next a paleontologist; the next a truck driver - whatever interested me at the time. There was also a sense that I was always acting; trying on different roles to see which suited me.

The problem is, I haven’t made any progress since then. I still don’t know “what I want to be when I grow up,” and the answer changes tremendously based on outside forces. I’m envious of those people who, for example, “have always known” they wanted to be a particular profession.

When I’m asked to answer alternate life design questions like “What would you do if you had all the money in the world?” or “What would you do if you had only a year to live?” I just don’t know. The purpose of these questions is to get at what’s really important to you, but I can’t even begin to prioritize. I have a lot of interests, but do I have a lot of passions?

Sometimes I think the only thing I’m passionate about is doing something that will put my name out there, where people can see it - fame, if you will. But what do I want to be famous for? Since I’ve stuck my thumbs in so many pies without really committing to anything, there’s nothing I’m at which I’m skilled enough to answer even that question.

Writing is one thing I keep coming back to, but I’m not sure it’s the answer. I’m not sure something I so often loathe doing can be considered that. I just seem to have a modicum of talent at it, and it is able to invoke a flow state - not always, but sometimes.

Actually, my life tends to be woefully short on flow states, which is part of the reason this question is so hard to answer.

While I would have loved to made this a series on “how to figure out your life purpose,” this is just not a question I can answer. It’s a question that troubles me daily.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

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