For you, making art is one of your life purposes and one of your meaning opportunities. Are there others?
There probably need to be, because putting all of our “meaning eggs” in one basket causes us to rise and fall precipitously based on how our art making and our art career are going. That’s emotionally and existentially dangerous!
A better idea is to create a menu and a mix of meaning opportunities that include your art making but that also include other things like relationships, activism, service, “being” states like calmness or contentment, and so on.
If you would like to learn more about the ins and outs of life purpose, and even create a revenue stream for yourself, it might turn out that teaching your own life purpose boot camp class is just the thing.
Recently 300 folks gathered in cyberspace and “enlisted” in my eight-week life purpose boot camp. They wanted to change course, chart a new direction, and experience life as more purposeful and more meaningful.
Was that even possible? Like countless of millions they had their doubts about the availability of anything genuinely new. What had religious leaders, philosophers, spiritual healers, self-help gurus, con artists, inspirational speakers, and every manner of salesperson, sage, and fool not said already?
Part of our epidemic of existential sadness, mislabeled for profit as “the mental disorder of depression,” is rooted in exactly this fear: that everything about life purpose and meaning has been said, that it has all fallen short or proven false, and that ideas like “life purpose” and “meaning” have little leg left to stand on.
But there are indeed new things to say and learn. By identifying meaning as a psychological experience, by announcing that there is no purpose to life but that life purposes can be articulated, by introducing the idea of value-based meaning-making and a corollary language that includes the ideas of “meaning investments” and “meaning opportunities,” a vision of proud, intentional living begins to appear.
What opens up for us is a way to stand up for our values and principles and influence our experience of meaning. We get more meaning because we recognize how to coax it, how to influence it, how even to create it. If you’d like to learn more about these ideas and maybe even teach a life purpose boot camp class yourself, please visit here.
https://ericmaisel.com/life-purpose-boot-camp-training/
If you’d like to sign up for the life purpose boot camp instructor training that begins March 24, you can sign up here:
https://ericmaisel.com/products-page-2/product-category/life-purpose-boot-camp-instructor-training/
Deepen your understanding of life purpose and help others deepen theirs! Take a look now.