yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Carl Jung - How to Find Your Purpose


4m read
·Nov 4, 2024

Your purpose is the reason you are here on Earth. It’s the thing that you were built for. So it’s an incredibly important thing to figure out because it’s the thing that guides you. Without a purpose, you’re lost. You have no North Star. Your life will feel meaningless.

And so today I’m going to talk about how to discover your purpose according to the philosophy of Carl Jung. While writing what is now widely considered his central work, The Red Book, Jung discovered the purpose of his own life. But he didn’t just discover the purpose of his own life. He also discovered where purpose comes from for all of us.

And based on my understanding of The Red Book, Jung says that your purpose is found in performing voluntary self-sacrifice. What would you willingly sacrifice yourself for? This means that your purpose isn’t found in money, car, clothes, status, or any other self-serving pleasure, but rather, your purpose is found in the thing that you would willingly suffer for. Your purpose lies in serving something that you deem as greater and more valuable than your own existence.

But what if you can’t find anything greater or more valuable than your own existence? Then you will experience life as meaningless and empty. A modern proverb states that life only promises us two things: death and taxes. And what does that mean? It means that life demands a sacrifice from us all. Death and taxes are both a form of self-sacrifice.

All life is born to be sacrificed in some way. We’re not getting out of this thing called life without sacrificing ourselves. Even the food that we eat is, in some way, sacrificed for our own continued existence. And so if you have nothing greater than yourself to sacrifice your time and energy for, you end up investing all your life force into yourself.

But since you eventually have to be sacrificed, all the energy that you invest in yourself essentially just goes to waste. And so if all your energy is just going to be wasted, that makes your life meaningless. Without a North Star or purpose outside of yourself, your life just becomes empty and meaningless suffering.

But if you find something worth sacrificing yourself for, worth serving and dedicating your life to, then your suffering becomes meaningful. When your suffering becomes meaningful, in some way, as both Friedrich Nietzsche and Viktor Frankl have noted, it ceases to be suffering. And you know this idea is true when you see it.

If you see someone willing to sacrifice themselves for something greater than themselves, you tend to think that they’ve found their purpose. When Socrates was imprisoned by his people, he had a chance to run and escape. But he willingly sacrificed himself for the principles of truth, justice, and honor. By sacrificing his own life, he believed that he was doing what was necessary to serve his city: Athens.

Jesus willingly sacrificed himself for the good of humanity. And Cato, who in some ways can be thought of as the Roman Socrates, sacrificed his life as a final resistance against Caesar’s rule because he refused to serve under someone he viewed as a tyrant. He sacrificed himself for the principles of liberty and freedom.

And regardless of what you think of these three names, there’s one thing you can’t deny: these men all had a purpose. They were on a mission. And the reason you know that is because they all found something more important than themselves that they thought it was worth sacrificing their own lives for.

But we don’t need to go to big historic examples to find people who found something worth sacrificing themselves for. This happens every day. There are mothers who sacrifice themselves for their children, missionaries for their church, cops for justice, activists for equality, and soldiers for freedom. Every day, people find something worth sacrificing themselves for, and by doing so, they discover their own purpose.

So what does it look like to implement Carl Jung’s wisdom of voluntary self-sacrifice into our own lives? We can take it day by day and dedicate ourselves to the service of others in a way we would be willing to do. We can serve others in a way that we would want to serve them, in a way that we would be happy to wake up each day and do.

We can create something that we would be willing to completely sacrifice ourselves for because eventually, we will be forced to. That is what life demands of us all. But if you don’t discover your purpose, your life becomes a forced sacrifice, and a forced sacrifice is felt as tyrannical and oppressive. You’ll start to experience life as a great evil.

But if you discover your purpose, your life becomes a voluntary sacrifice. And a voluntary sacrifice, such as that of a mother for her child, is felt as incredibly meaningful. And so if you discover your purpose, you will experience life as incredibly meaningful and good.

So I’ll ask again: what would you willingly sacrifice yourself for? That’s where your purpose lies.

More Articles

View All
Multiplying 3-digit by 2-digit numbers | Grade 5 (TX TEKS) | Khan Academy
Let’s get a little bit of practice multiplying numbers. So, what is 365 times 84? I encourage you to pause this video; hopefully, you have some scratch paper around, and try to calculate what this is. All right, now let’s do this together. What I like to…
The Auburn Eagle - Smarter Every Day 32
Hey, it’s me, Destin. Welcome to Smarter Every Day. So today we are getting ready for the Iron Bowl. We’re at Jordan-Hare Stadium before anybody else is here, and we are going to practice with the Eagles. For every Auburn game, the eagle flies around and …
Civic life, private life, politics, and government | Citizenship | High school civics | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to talk about how people can interact with influence and participate in society. When you do so, you’re participating in civic life, which is distinct from your private life. Private life includes all the ways that you pursue h…
Diving for Cyanobacteria in Lake Huron | National Geographic
Water carries so much information in just one drop. [Music] Today, we’re in Lake Huron. We came specifically to explore cyanobacteria, which is also known as blue-green algae, which were the first organisms to start producing oxygen on our planet. There i…
It Started: The Upcoming Housing Collapse - Round 2
What’s up, Graham? It’s guys here. So, we got to talk about the housing market because after two years of non-stop bidding wars, price increases, and low inventory, believe it or not, asking prices have begun to fall. Except for Betty White’s house, which…
GPT-4o (Omni) math tutoring demo on Khan Academy
Hi, my name is Sal Khan. I’m the founder of Khan Academy, and I’m also the author of a new book about artificial intelligence and education called “Brave New Words.” OpenAI invited myself and my son, Imran, here to try out some of their new technology. So…