Purpose is a term freighted with significance; life purpose even more so. Realizing what our life purpose is—let alone fulfilling it—is so daunting a task that there’s a huge industry out there that wants to help us with it. Because we have to have one, right? If we don’t find it and go after it, life will be empty and our lives will have been wasted. This is tough enough to deal with early on in life, but as we get older it can lead to all kinds of stress and anxiety. If we haven’t found it yet, does that mean we’re failures? Or is there still time to undertake the quest?

Assuming we actually do have a life purpose, why is it so hard to determine what it is for so many people? What’s the big mystery? Whose purpose is it, anyway? If it’s yours, it should not be opaque to you. If it’s part of some universal master plan that requires we race through a series of mazes like rats in order to find the life-purpose cheese, do you really want to play that game? I don’t.

Life mission is another one of those terms, but with a twist that includes coming up with a mission statement for your life. It would be interesting to take a poll to find out how many people have written mission statements for their lives. But I think I already know what the results would be: damn few.

This idea that each of us has a specific life purpose probably derives from humanity’s deep need to understand the much bigger picture: the purpose or meaning of life itself. That isn’t something we can actually know from our particular vantage point, but it’s hard to live with the unknowing. So we search for the meaning of life and try to figure out what our purpose is in having one (a life).

This may seem radical to some, although I know it won’t to others, but if there’s a big-picture purpose to your being alive right now, you probably will never know what it is. If you believe you’ve found it and are living it, congratulations. I mean that sincerely. But if you’re still looking for it, feel free to give up the search. Have a bowl of ice cream. Listen to some music. Call a friend. Enjoy your day.