Sometimes things just don't work out; life seems intent on proving that you are not capable enough. Sometimes you are prevented on moving to higher or better paths and endeavours. Instead, you are dragged down and forced to traverse the lower roads, to eke out a bland existence in a fundamentally alienating universe.
You may then be left with a feeling of purposelessness, a sense that things took their own turn and have left you high and dry with your wants and your plans. Perhaps you may even realise that you don't know what you want anymore.
Strangely, though, I'm not too hung up on these feelings. Well, it's not exactly strange because I think I know why. The reason, however, is strange enough—I'm not so bothered by purposelessness because I've realised that it's pointless anyway. At least when you don't have the means to control your life.
So how does it work? How can the realisation of pointlessness somehow be helpful?
Perhaps it will become clear once I explain my reasoning. The point is when you realise that there is no point, you become less insistent on fulfilling a specific purpose (as opposed to a general one, such as to be happy). You become less preoccupied with following a predetermined course. In a somewhat Schopenhauerian sense, when you realise that there is nothing but the chains that bind you to the material world, all that you can lose are the chains that bind you to self-inflicted suffering; if you desire nothing that badly, you wouldn't feel that bad about not having something.
But what do I mean by the fact that there is no point? Have we perchance arrived at the Grand Hotel Abyss?
This isn't a sigh of despair. If you've read some of my earlier entries, you might notice that I try to draw strength from weakness, zest from purposelessness. Why I reason about life is not to express a desire to give up, but to articulate a wish to go on.
As for why there is no point, I'm not going to offer a grandiose narrative about suffering. I think suffering is merely a consequence and could therefore be reduced or avoided if we focus on the right things. Instead, my reasoning is much more Marxist in character. It stems from our alienation from our own labour.
The fact is, out there, almost no one is interested in your purpose or the exact function that you desire for yourself. They say that you have to sell yourself. What this really means is you have to make you seem useful to others. And that's how you make you useful to yourself—without being made use of, you'd seldom have the means for subsistence. You serve yourself by, willingly or not, first serving the purposes of others, most likely the impersonal ends of your employers.
Thus, what is the point of being stubborn about a specific purpose of yours, especially when that doesn't mesh well with reality as it turns out? You'd only inflict physical and emotional suffering on yourself. If you can serve your own purpose while at the same time serving those of your employers, that's great. But such serendipity may be hard to come by.
This realisation that they hardly matter in society is what makes me fairly indifferent to personal milestones and sense of direction. If no one else cares, why should you care? It's your choice: You can choose to be exacting and suffer, or you can choose to shrug them off as inconsequential.
A personal kind of purposelessness, therefore, turns out to be good. But to take it further you need to turn it into the ability to adapt, something that I'm still trying to learn. Basically, if I don't have anything that I badly want to be, I can be anything that people want me to be.
And therein lies power, the flowering of your potential to actually take control.
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