Member-only story
The purpose of life isn’t money or happiness. It’s being useful.
My uncle retired at sixty-two and was dead inside by sixty-four. Not literally — he’s still alive, still sends forwarded emails — but something left him. He’d spent thirty years as a civil engineer, fixing drainage systems in small municipalities nobody cared about.
He complained about it constantly. The bureaucracy, the ingratitude, the low pay. And then he stopped, because he’d earned it, and he had absolutely no idea what to do with himself.
I keep thinking about him whenever someone asks me what I want out of life. The usual answers feel hollow — I want to be happy, I want financial freedom, I want to travel more. These aren’t wrong exactly, but they feel like things you say rather than things you actually believe.
The idea I keep coming back to — and I’m not fully sure I’ve earned the right to say this yet — is that the point of being here is to be useful. Not in a noble, self-sacrificing way. Not in the way people say it on LinkedIn with a graphic of a lighthouse.
Happiness as a byproduct
The happiness thing bugs me the most, honestly. We talk about happiness like it’s a destination — something you arrive at and then maintain, like a good posture. But I’ve never met anyone who was consistently happy because they…
