Purpose

The IndieWeb carnival for August 2026, hosted by Chris Shaw, has the theme of purpose.

Well that's a bit of a tricky subject to write about, isn't it!

Only today, my mum was talking to me about a classics course she wants to do. She's largely talked herself out of it now, but the reason she wants to do it? To have a purpose.

She wants to do the course because it gives her a purpose. Yet of course, couldn't she just study the classics by herself? Could that not be her purpose?

Well, I suppose, a purpose is often something external. A purpose needs to feel weighty, imposing, because a purpose often needs to dominate your life in a way. That's a lot easier when it comes from without.

Recently, also, I've been thinking about wasted time. I keep on feeling as if I am wasting my time, and not using the time I have wisely, as if it is some fleeting and ever-diminishing resource I must make a use of. If you ask people what kinds of things are wasted time, they might say things like scrolling Tiktok/Instagram/etc, or watching Netflix shows (but passively; actively watching a show you enjoy isn't considered time wasted!) or watching Youtube videos which is my vice. Yet time of course doesn't have a preference for how it's spent, and there's arguably no reason why the time spent doing these activities is wasted. The main reason is just that ~it~you don't value what the activity gives you~~it~. The benefits (the reels you saw, the videos you watched, whatever) are valueless to you. As a result, it's wasted time. As soon as the outcome is valuable to you, it ceases to be wasted time.

And time spent directed towards something that you consider valuable: isn't that a purpose? The purpose is what you want to have achieved. It's impossible not to achieve something with your time; achieving what you want is achieving the purpose. The achievements you don't value are the time you wasted.

As you get older too, there are things you will have valued when you were young, but that with hindsight you cease to value. And then you look back on that time and think that you had wasted the time, when in the moment you reckoned you were doing something valuable, something with purpose.

There are things too that you can consider so valuable that you are even instinctively drawn to do them: passions, obsessions. These are things that you value so much you can't not do them. You're always thinking about them, always thinking of how to do them better, always itching to spend every spare hour and minute doing them. I suppose the question there is: how much do you want to sacrifice for your purpose? There are other things that are purposes, too, like maybe doing the dishes, or seeing friends, that you might want less than your passionate obsession, yet there's value in doing those things as well.

A colleague told me about a television show he watched (yes, two levels of indirection) about a triathlete who had reached an very impressive level in his field. However, the man's day was nothing but triathlon. He'd wake up at the crack of dawn, go for a run. Come back home, refuel for his swim. Swim, come back, refuel, go to the gym, come back, refuel, go for a bike ride, come back, refuel, go for another run, so on and so on. His entire day was spent doing the triathlon training. He was so busy doing this he never met his friends, didn't have any even, had no family, no other hobbies apart from triathlon at all.

He had a purpose, but he was too given to just one purpose. A happy life is composed of many different small purposes: friends, family, work, hobbies. Time spent on (with) each of these is valuable time, and so is our purpose.

And with that I'm out of ideas!