Purpose is born from aligning your life with the transcendent. As a secular person it can be hard to pin down what exactly the meaning of waking up every day is all about. The real impact of the death of god was the sister disintegration of spirituality.
The transcendent is not something woo-woo, mystical or even necessarily intangible. In my mind the transcendent or sublime is about the ordinary pursuit of the extraordinary. It’s about the useful fiction of chasing unreasonable, audacious visions and seeking to make them manifest. Most importantly of all, it’s about making meaning in a universe where it might otherwise be absent. These ideas are not about subscription to a faith or particular ideology, but rather about the very fundamental nature of how we show up in the world.
As a maker of things, as a creative spirit in the world, it is trivially easy to get pulled into a zillion different directions. To chase money, status, perfect abs, perfect relationships or the continually disappointing pursuit of the “last” piece of art in a space (for more than three seconds anyway). Personally, I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy on things that in retrospect didn’t really matter. Through the lens of optimization I sought to find flow charts, systems and answers to the problems in my life, be they ones of money, meaning or avoiding back pain from sitting too long. The more optimized my approaches became, the less happy, healthy and rich I felt. With each day, it took a little more energy to drag myself out of bed, or write something I felt proud of, or do much of anything for the love of the game. Things that used to energize me, that I was passionate about became laborious and empty. Constantly chasing the “answers” like Easter eggs that when found would magically liberate me from my quiet suffering only made the problem worse.
As you advance creatively, you run into more people that you think are like you doing similar things in the world. The more you learn from them and spend time with them you become more alike. As you progress, it is easy to find yourself saying “this is the right way to do this” without realizing the obvious flaw in this thinking. The issue with ordinary life is not the tracks that be, like going to a great school and getting a job at an elite, exclusive law firm, it is the idea of a track itself. The path to the best life of an individual should likely be kept that way, individual. When you copy someone else’s process you only end up making a worse version of what that person is doing. In order to self-transcend and actualize, I believe it is imperative to follow your own nose. When we pigeon-hole ourselves into boxes and labels, we rob ourselves of our uniqueness and beauty. Most importantly we often get directed away from the pursuit of the most meaningful things in our lives. The best thing you can do for yourself, the more honest it is, is usually increasingly strange to other people. Swinging your feet back and forth on a bar stool that is just a little too tall might bring you an immense feeling of joy, and also be extremely socially odd. That’s part of the process. Authenticity is hard because it’s the opposite of what society expects from us, and is not something we can make a neat little graph about.
Perhaps the most insidious trap of “doing the right things” is that the logic appears very neat on paper. It will make perfect sense to you and all of your friends or coworkers. Unfortunately the path that is most rational or understood is seldom the one that makes us come alive. Locking yourself in a room for 5 hours a day 6 days a week to have an imaginary conversation with someone is the work of a madperson. It is also how a book is written. Driving out to the middle of nowhere to catapult oneself off a 200 ft slope covered in snow and ice, is the most well-conceived suicide plan of all time. No one would suspect a thing. Instead we refer to such people as extreme athletes. The most meaningful, or important or fun things when deconstructed, make no actual sense. My finest moments are never the result of being the most responsible or level-headed. Generally in a half-inebriated state I find myself waking from a trance, coming out the other side of deep work. Whether it’s studying chess, painting on my weathered digital tablet, or writing a dozen pages on revelations from the Tao Te Ching. None of these are the musings of a responsible person, and yet somehow we quietly admire people that seem unaffected by anything outside of play.
The people that are proudest of what they’ve accomplished are not those who have the most stuff, or make the most money, but are often the ones who smile often. If I could give advice to my younger self, it would probably be to stop being in such a hurry to be something. The meaning of life isn’t to work, but work often creates meaning in life. The best advice you can get will probably come from yourself and not a book you read or a podcast you like. Corny as it may be, there is something to be said for meditating on the chorus of your own soul. I think success and meaning are born from being in touch with yourself and not having the right answer or system.
So consider the most transcendent or sublime endeavors you can imagine. Run towards that to some extent always or as much as you can. All of the external ironically often falls in place when it becomes an afterthought. The dragon is caught by giving up the chase.
FourthEye 
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