Purpose as Service to a Self-Led Future

It's purpose that infuses things with a kind of life energy that is related to individuation. There's no acorn that wants to just stay an acorn and Right. You know, kind of, lull about in the sun. Every acorn wants to become an oak tree. It's better than being eaten by a squirrel. It's through challenge and meaning and purpose and, dare I add, suffering. Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day. I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod. Today, we are going to talk about purpose. The dictionary says that purpose is something set up as an object or end to be attained and intention. And how do we, figure out what that might be? What is the object? What is our intention? There are so many things on all the self help shelves, and our cultural, inclination to set up to do lists of healthy habits and how to build skills and all the rest of it. Very extroverted. We are very much a doing practical kind of culture. But Jung and others have a a deeper and more soulful idea about finding one's real purpose, and that's what we're going to circumambulate. Well, you know, that's an interesting place to start. And I think I'm gonna sort of complexify it right away because arguably arguably, we all kind of yearn for a sense of purpose, and and that can be Mhmm. That can be even, like, a really small thing. Like, I remember when my kids were little. Obviously, you feel a sense of purpose like parenting. Right? That's a kind of a grand purpose in a way. However, I will tell you that on on the sort of level of the day to day, very little that you do feels purposeful because you put the Legos all away knowing that they're all gonna be strewn across the floor the next day. You make a meal that someone's not gonna eat, that you're just gonna have to clean up all the dishes for, and then you make another meal. It it doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere. You know? It doesn't Yeah. It doesn't feel like your activities in some sense have don't feel purposeful. They just sort of, like, endlessly repetitive. So I I think that even on the scale of sort of the the day to day, the week to week, you know, we wanna feel like we we're working towards something, you know, that that our activity is purposeful. Mhmm. So so it is it is possible to feel that sense of purpose, like, when your boss says, hey. We just got a big new contract. We …