What Should I be doing with my Life

 Finding Purpose in Life

If I can find my Ikigai, I imagine I shall be happy and fulfilled forever. This question haunts me practically everyday. I read a lot of self-help books. The New Earth [Eckhart Tolle], What Should I Do with My Life? [Po Bronson], The Road Less Traveled [Scott Peck] and more.  They did deepen my understanding of the issue of dealing with one’s life, but the question still remains.

When you are above 50 and have been freelancing – read jobless  - for some years, it is nearly impossible to find a job at the levels you last held. Even if you are willing to compromise, ageism is a fact in India.

Today I read an article about people over 50 years who lost their jobs during this COVID-19 pandemic. Many have financial responsibilities like children to be educated and EMIs to be paid. Teachers are selling vegetables and shockingly, one man who has decades of experience and held a high paying job, has taken to accompanying dumpsters at Rs 50 a trip, and lives like a vagrant. One’s heart goes out to such people. After the 2008 crisis, I read about people in USA who lost their jobs, and then give up their apartments, and had to live in their cars, and eat in soup kitchens.  Will this happen in India now?

When you don’t have money for ‘basic needs’, then the purpose of life is to find means to survive. As Viktor Frankl says, we need to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead reflect on what life expects of us, which is different for each person. Or as Eckart says, purpose keeps changing as you go through life. Seize the present purpose, and live it.

Even asking such a question is a luxury. If you are able to ask the question, it means you have enough money to live on, and now are wondering what to do. You have choices and are simply dreaming of a better way to live, maybe comparing yourself with others. You should be thankful really and count your blessings – health, family, and home. Your purpose may not present itself in grand ways, like saving the world from the coronavirus. It maybe that your child needs help with online classes or you have to pitch in household chores - such boring stuff.  But then, this is your purpose and your duty. This is what life presents to you.

Our society has evolved, but not all for the good. We have become wired to think that certain things are necessities, and without them your life is worthless. You keep working hard to live the lifestyle you want, but it is a fragile life, fueled by debt and expectations of rising salaries. You are caught up in  the rat race and are miserable. It falls apart during economic downturn or whatever black swan event happens : 9/11, September 2008, COVID-19. We have to teach ourselves to free our mind of the programming by society, with its philosophy of consumerism, strive for more profits and destruction of our planet.

It is  possible to have less, and the same time, feel contented and happy. My happiest years were when I was a student, and isolated myself in my room, and reach literature and solved engineering problems. No TV, no internet, limited socializing, no love, no substances, yet I was floating I air. I floated through all of my 7 years of college life, and did not ask what life held for me in future.

During my childhood and youth, reading was my passion. I hoped to become a writer. I thought that if I could craft passages like the first chapter of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, my life would have been worthwhile.  Now I have to resign myself to the fact that I cannot dream up a riveting plot for even a short story, let alone a novel. But writing out my thoughts is a meditative experience for me.

So here I am, expressing what I feel deeply about, and finding intimations of redemption.