I usually write about ordinary events and experiences from my life. Philosophy is not my forte. Even when Fr. AMA asks me to read a Will and Spirit by Gerald May or The End of Desire by Guy Thomson or Isamatsu, I always keep them pending in my book Q and move on to lighter stuff. But this essay got triggered by two random events. One a sharing by a well-read Sangha member during our weekly Q & A in the Zendo. A quote attributed to Albert Camus which said “Whatever keeps us alive from suicide is our life’s purpose”. And another a question by a distant relative of mine to a family friend, “Why did Vishy join a Zendo, What is his purpose in life?”.
Those who know me from childhood know that I was a rolling stone who failed to gather any moss. Almost like a leaf in the storm. No one was sure where I was going to end up. And that includes me.
That quote of Camus comes from his famous book “The Myth of Sisyphus”. That is one of the myth I am familir with . As I have read the folklore story about Naranath Branthan from the wonderful book of Aithihya Mala when I was a small child. That book was a big tome of wonderful collection of legends from the land of Kerala. Naranath Branthan (Madman of Naranath) was considered a divine person, a Mukhta who pretended to be mad. His chief activity consisted of rolling a big stone up a hill and then letting it fall back down. His birthplace is believed to be in Pattambi, very close to where I was born and brought up. There is a large statue of Naranath in Pattambi, Palakkad district of Kerala where he is believed to have lived.
Btw he did have some great pedigree. Naranathu was born as the son of Vararuchi, the famous scholar who adorned the court of Vikramaditya. Naranathu was one among the twelve offsprings of Vararuchi and was brought up in the Naranathu Mangalathu Mana, situated at Chethallur in Palakkad district. Vararuchi’s children were also known as Parayi Petta Panthirukulam (twelve children born from the Pariah woman). That is what legends says.
I tried to put together whatever little bit I knew about purposeless living. And it ended up as a long essay. That is an indicator of how little I know about it. Those who know it well always come up with pithy one-liner maxims… and those who don’t know write an essay. Happy reading and forge your own purposeless purpose.
The Cliché of Purpose
We are raised on a cliché: live with a purpose, make your life meaningful. This refrain echoes in coaching sessions, sermons, classrooms, and boardrooms, often reinforced by the modern self-help canon, from Stephen Covey’s principles to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl’s logotherapy, born from the horrors of the camps, convinced generations that if we can find a “why,” we can endure any “how.” For many, that “why” has been misinterpreted as a divine destiny, a purpose written before birth.
And yet—nothing could be more absurd.
The Myths of Endless Tasks: A Global Chorus
Long before modern philosophy, cultures intuited the futility of searching for a ready-made purpose outside ourselves. Humanity have a shared origin, challenges, issues and myths. One will find parallels in every place. Myths of endless, repetitive tasks appear across the world, each exposing the emptiness of borrowed purposes.
While Sisyphus was the most famous one across the globe. (Western civilisation had a way of glorifying anything from there at the cost of everything.)
- Sisyphus (Greek Mythology): Condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only for it to tumble back down, forever.
- Naranathu Branthan (Kerala Folklore): The “madman” who daily rolled a stone up a hill and let it tumble down, laughing. Villagers mocked him, but in folklore he is remembered as a mukhta (liberated one), showing the futility of worldly pursuits.
- The Danaids (Greek Mythology): Fifty daughters condemned to carry water in leaky jars that never fill. Their punishment is endless labor without completion.
- Loki’s Binding (Norse Mythology): Bound beneath a serpent dripping venom, Loki writhes endlessly as his wife catches the drops in a bowl. The cycle never ends.
- Samsara (Buddhist Teaching): The wheel of rebirth itself is the ultimate endless task—beings repeat craving and suffering until awakening.
These stories whisper the same truth: life does not hand us a ready-made purpose. The gods may impose endless tasks, society may hand us borrowed ideals, but the meaning of those tasks is not given. It is we who must create meaning in the act of living.
Camus and the Absurd
Albert Camus saw this with startling clarity. In The Myth of Sisyphus he begins: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” If life has no inherent meaning, the first question is whether it is worth living at all.
His answer is not despair but revolt: to live fully, passionately, and creatively, even while knowing life has no ultimate justification. His symbol is Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder forever. Camus ends: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This is the absurd: our hunger for meaning colliding with a silent universe. To demand a cosmic purpose is to fall into illusion. To accept one blindly is what Camus called “philosophical suicide.” Life has no script. Meaning is not found—it is forged in the act of living.
Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning
If Camus startled the world by declaring that life is absurd, Viktor Frankl offered a different but equally radical insight: life always has meaning, but it is not given in advance.
Frankl was a psychiatrist, a Jew imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau, who lost his parents, brother, and pregnant wife in the camps. Out of that crucible came Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). Unlike Camus, who framed the question in terms of suicide and revolt, Frankl framed it in terms of survival and dignity.
The Core of Logotherapy
Frankl called his approach Logotherapy—from the Greek logos, meaning “meaning.” Where Freud emphasized pleasure and Adler emphasized power, Frankl insisted that the primary drive of human beings is the will to meaning.
He was clear: this meaning is not ordained by God, fate, or some cosmic script. It is not a universal “purpose of life” that applies to everyone. Instead, it is always personal, concrete, and situational. Life, he said, is like a series of questions posed to us. We do not get to ask “what is the meaning of life?” in the abstract. Rather, life asks us, and we answer by how we live.
Three Pathways to Meaning
- Through creative work – what we give to the world.
- Through experiencing love, beauty, or goodness – what we receive from the world.
- Through the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering – how we bear what cannot be changed.
This third pathway is perhaps his most profound. He did not glorify suffering, but he insisted that when suffering is unavoidable, we still retain the freedom to choose our stance. In that freedom lies dignity.
Freedom and Responsibility
For Frankl, the essence of being human is freedom and responsibility. We are free to choose our response to any situation, and we are responsible for what we make of that freedom. Even in Auschwitz, stripped of everything, he wrote: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
This is why Logotherapy is not about prescribing meaning, but about helping people discover it for themselves.
Frankl and Camus: Divergence and Convergence
Placed alongside Camus, the contrast is striking:
- Camus: Life has no inherent meaning. The universe is indifferent. Our task is to revolt, to live fully without appeal.
- Frankl: Life always has meaning, but it is not abstract or preordained. It must be discovered in the concrete moment, through work, love, or suffering.
And yet, there is a strange convergence. Both reject the idea of a cosmic script. Both insist that meaning, if it exists, must be lived here and now. Both affirm human freedom in the face of a silent universe.
Camus imagines Sisyphus happy as he pushes his stone. Frankl imagines the prisoner dignified as he endures the camp. Both are affirmations of life without guarantees.
Born Empty, Creating Ourselves
When we are born, we are born with almost empty minds. Nature fills us just enough to survive—breath, instinct, the capacity to grow. But beyond that, it leaves us open. And the more empty the mind space we are given at the start, the more possibility there is for becoming.
For animals, that emptiness seems limited. Their minds are tuned to survival, their instincts already inscribed. But for human beings, the mindspace is vast—as vast as the sky. David Hume once described the mind as tabula rasa, an empty slate. Into that openness, experience begins to write.
From the very beginning, we start creating ourselves. First comes identity: the fragile sense of “I” that forms in infancy, the ego that allows us to navigate the world. Later, we begin to create our own purposes.
The phrase “find your purpose” misleads us. It suggests that our purpose has been created by someone else, hidden somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered like a buried treasure. That is simply not true. Purpose is not preordained. It is not second-hand.
Just as we once created our identity, we must also create our own purpose. To recreate our purpose is to recreate ourselves, to peg our own space within this vast world. And because each of us is unique, so too will be our purpose.
The purposes of others—whether Buddha, Krishnamurti, or Mother Teresa—are not ours to inherit. They may inspire us, but they cannot substitute for our own. To live by another’s purpose is to live a second-hand life.
We must create our own purpose out of nothing. Out of the emptiness we were born into. Out of the freedom that nature gave us.
Nature’s Silence and Our Fallacy of Purpose
If we look to nature for an answer, we find only a deeper silence. From an evolutionary perspective, survival and flourishing are what life “does.” Traits like the capacity for storytelling, the feeling of awe and wonder, the urge to laugh and play, the creation of ritual and dance, and the making of music and humour evolved because they helped us endure and bond.
Nature does not ask “why.” The tree does not grow to give shade. The river does not flow to quench thirst. The lion does not hunt “for” the zebra. The ecological food chain itself “just happened”—a web of interactions shaped by chance, adaptation, and extinction.
Our fallacy is to imagine that because something works, it must have been designed for that purpose. Camus would call this the absurd. Zen would call it emptiness.
