— Today we’re talking about purpose — how to find it. Some people identify it with a profession, others believe it’s something broader — a thing you’re ready to do even for free. People call it “purpose.” I want to ask you a few questions to understand and dispel the myths: does purpose even exist, how do you find it, and how can you integrate it into daily life and routine?
The first question. Does purpose exist globally, or is it just the ego’s need to feel useful to the world — “I was born for something greater”?
— That’s a very common question. It always reminds me of an old anecdote that people who work in personal development like to tell.
An old man comes to a seer and asks: “Tell me, what was my main purpose in life?” The seer replies: “Remember when you were 11, you hit a boy at school, and you were expelled?” — “Yes, I remember.” — “And another girl was admitted in your place.” — “So what?” — “That’s it. Your purpose was to make room for that girl.” — “Anything else?” — “No, that’s all.”
💡People who seek their purpose usually want to find something special, socially significant: “I did something great.” That’s why, before chasing the term, everyone should ask themselves: why do I want to know my purpose? What’s behind this desire?
Often it comes from a feeling like, “I’m not on my path, I’m wasting time, there must be something else.” This impulse can be genuine — then the person begins not to search for a “purpose” as a magical formula, but to ask questions like: how does life work? Why do events happen? What are the cause-and-effect chains, and how can I act within them? But if the goal is just “to find my purpose,” that’s already an exalted setup.
Let’s look at the definition: search engines describe “purpose” as “a stable, meaningful reason for one’s existence — what a person considers worth living, learning, working, and developing for.” People imagine it like this: “my purpose is to build a company with 10,000 employees,” or “to give birth to six geniuses.” They seek some stable, significant reason for existing.
If we start from that definition, the next question is — why does a person even exist now, in this time? Many automatically replace meaning with “to be happy.” But why necessarily happiness? Harmony and balance are not the same as happiness. And balance and harmony do not contain large amounts of money.
— Could purpose simply be your joyful experience of life, not grand acts like planting trees, etc.?
— And again we see the word “happiness.” Notice: a person not only wants to find purpose — they want it to be easy and pleasant. But by definition, purpose is “that for which you consider it necessary to live, learn, work, and develop.” So a person assumes they’ll work solely for that reason. But is it possible to work simply because that’s human nature — not for the sake of one final “happy” goal? To accept events as they are — happy or unhappy — and continue living.
When a person defines purpose as a final goal, it often becomes a stop in their growth: “I’ll live for this one thing.” But it’s hard to develop your whole life for one material reason — and what remains if it doesn’t work out? Children, property — they don’t “belong” to you in the absolute sense, and they aren’t a guarantee of meaning.
— Often someone lives 30–40 years, achieves material success, but at some point, it loses meaning, and they start asking: “Why am I alive?” That’s not a final goal — it’s a higher meaning, a reason to keep moving forward.
— Yes, when at 40 someone says, “Money doesn’t matter,” that’s telling. We often listen to successful entrepreneurs who tell us how to live — and then years later they say they lived wrong: “I should’ve spent more time with my kids,” “I should’ve worked less.” The question is: why did we listen to them before? It turns out they were just sharing their searches, not truth.
If a person reaches the conclusion “I lack meaning,” you have to ask: why didn’t they feel it before? What changed in their perception? Because exactly five years ago they could have been making much more serious mistakes in life — in development, in awareness, in analysis — yet they didn’t feel their life was “wrong.” And in this state, most people believe there’s a magic pill — “find your purpose and everything will be fine.” That’s an illusion, an entirely egoistic act. They lived the same way before — they just weren’t talking about it.
Many postpone happiness “for later”: “I’ll work ten years, start a family, work more, then travel — and that’s when I’ll be happy.” It’s the “eternal postponement.” And in the end, they hope some magic formula will fix everything. There is no such pill.
If we rely on the word “purpose,” many people simply don’t understand the meaning of life. So more questions arise: Can we find an anchor so that the question “what’s the meaning?” doesn’t arise at all? What is purpose? Where to move?
Going back to the anecdote: a person seeks “meaning,” and in the end it turns out the meaning of their life was to live the life they had. Purpose, in that sense, becomes an egoistic idea: “Explain why I exist, and I’ll decide whether I accept it or not.” But sometimes the answer is simple: you lived to live your life — and that was the meaning.
The meaning of every person’s life is essentially the same — to live. People want to materialize it, find “something extraordinary,” but there will always be someone richer and happier — there’s no limit. “Just living” means accepting that there are true and untrue actions, the laws of the universe. Then the question “Did I live according to universal law?” shifts to a new level: does it even matter if you did? But the spiritual world doesn’t care how you lived.
In the spiritual world, there are far more complex examples. Take Lucifer — a fallen angel. An angel, in terms of spiritual hierarchy, is higher than a human. The spiritual world experienced that event, so what is a human who chooses wrong or different acts to it? That’s the point.
A person goes through stages, committing many false actions and mistakes. That’s not “purpose” — it’s just life. There is no purpose. A person has only one task: to move along the right evolutionary path. Everything else is micro-tasks. You can highlight them — tasks within one life, tied to certain actions and realizations — but they’re both connected and not connected to life.
The question of purpose is closely linked to the multiplicity of lives. If we speak of purpose, everyone must define: do you live from the position that the material world created the spiritual and invented “purpose,” or that there is a spiritual world in which purpose exists? Since the origin of this idea appears in religion, psychology, and esotericism — in the question “why does man exist?” — it means a person realizes that life isn’t limited to one lifetime. But if life is limited to a single one — then what “purpose” can there be? Like this article — it’s clearly limited, because it has no life. We’ll turn off the computer — and it ceases to exist.
If someone says they have a purpose — then they’re not free. If life is just one, the idea of “divinely assigned purpose” turns a person into a slave of the idea: if it’s assigned, why seek it? Yet here’s the nuance: a person believes that everything they do — they did themselves.
When you listen to people talk about spiritual development, pay attention to how often skepticism slips in: “the spiritual world is nonsense, man decides everything himself.” Listen closely to what conclusions they draw, how they frame their ideas.
Once again: the main reason people start thinking about purpose — if a person is thinking about it, it means they feel bad, heavy. Or they’re once again trying to manipulate circumstances, to prove they’re an important, serious person. That’s why there’s so much talk about “people with purpose” — Elon Musk, famous presidents. They’re put on a pedestal: here they are, with purpose, while the rest are ‘lesser beings.’ And those same people justify that “for great goals, it’s okay to kill millions.” And those who admire them secretly wish to trade places and act the same way.
The danger is that a person assigns themselves “purpose” — elevating themselves above others.
From here comes another key thought. If there’s “purpose,” then it can be “better” or “worse.” That’s pure ego and comparison. So the real question is: what’s more important — purpose or state of being? If I’m not searching for purpose but feel stable and well, must I discuss it? Another person might say: “No, you just haven’t reached enlightenment.” But I don’t delude myself that there’s a “golden pill” somewhere. I just try to understand why I sometimes feel heavy. That’s part of my life — I live through it.
— Maybe that’s happiness?
— Happiness might be living through life with all its events — good and bad — yet remaining in an adequate state. People often link happiness with achievements, victories. But what if happiness is neutral perception? When you’re equally calm whether you earned a billion dollars or lost it, someone was born or died, opened a business or closed it. It’s a great blessing — to feel peace and freedom.
Here’s an example from my family. My mom hasn’t worked since 1994. My dad worried about money his whole life and died at 54. My mom never worried — and still doesn’t, even living alone. Though her income decreased. That doesn’t make her “uninteresting.” It’s a blessing — not to have that problem. The same with my wife: she doesn’t worry about what to do, doesn’t obsess about business. I, on the other hand, constantly think, launch new projects — I have more than 20 businesses. I’m fine with that; it’s normal for me. But for many people, it would be torture. Worrying about money in the modern world — that’s the real problem. My mom doesn’t worry at all. She has other worries, but not this one. I often experience that energy of worry myself — it’s complex and specific.
— Could money anxiety be linked to responsibility — say, providing for the family?
💡— Anxiety doesn’t depend on the number of tasks or the amount of responsibility. I’ve had times when there was a lot to do — but no anxiety. And times when I was doing nothing — but anxiety was there. It’s not tied to children or duties.
Here’s an example. I moved to the U.S. at 40 — with a wife who doesn’t plan to work and four kids. I was used to an expensive lifestyle in Moscow, with high spending. In America, I didn’t have capital “for 400 of my lives.” People who came earlier said they had only $100 and “it was so hard.” I listened and didn’t understand — what was hard? They got housing help, found jobs, started earning. My issue was different: I was used to spending a lot and had to maintain that level — accounts, services, projects, reputation, image, flights, houses, cars. I was used to it and couldn’t give it up.
Moreover, I was 40, not 25. I came to a new country — but not from zero. Sure, I could’ve gone to work at McDonald’s for $25/hour, or a coffee shop, or as a project manager for $100/hour.
In 2007 I opened my first software company. I was 24. Back then, I could easily live on $1,000 a month. For some, that was big money then. Why? Because we reinvested in the business. I could’ve earned more — I had before, as a project manager. At 25, I could live on $1,000 and not worry. Now, that’s impossible.
So why do some people feel things are hard and others don’t? Because many trap themselves in this complexity. Especially in Russian-speaking circles: people constantly ask, “How much does your house cost?” “What about LGBTQ issues in schools?” “How do you live among Americans?” — all with the undertone “it must be hard for you.” But I look around and think: what’s hard? On the contrary, in many ways it’s better than before.
For example, my kids’ education in the U.S. — I couldn’t have given them that level in Moscow. Here they study among diverse people, not just an “elite.” That diversity has always been important to me. Recently I saw a sign in my daughter’s classroom (I can’t imagine this in my school):
“Fairness isn’t when everyone gets the same thing. Fairness is when everyone gets what they need to be happy.”
— So it turns out there is no purpose, and there’s no point asking that question? Is it better to ask about the meaning of life? And is the meaning of life simply to live, to live out your life while fulfilling the human task?
— One of the main tasks of a human being is to expand one’s perception. If a person perceives the world narrowly, then they see only a small slice of it. It’s like sitting in a room, watching TV, and thinking you know the world — living inside a kind of box. In reality you don’t understand what’s happening. We live amid an endless amount of deception: we were deceived in the family, at school, at work, in business, in politics. People receive Nobel Prizes and then prove that previous laureates were wrong. So were those people “deceiving”? There are countless such examples.
💡Therefore the task is to expand perception, to see things as they are. To seek the right actions at any moment: where to go, what to say, how to deal with your health. For one person, the advice “go to the doctor” saves their life, another doesn’t listen and dies. A third goes, but the doctors are mistaken. Life consists of these choices and cause-and-effect chains.
When we place this under observation, life becomes vivid. A vivid life is not measured by money. Money can help, but it can also destroy. It gives opportunities, but it can bring misfortune. Having money, bandits can attack you and kill you for it; having money, you can quarrel with a huge number of people; you can fly somewhere, and that particular plane will crash. And there are endless stories like this. That means the essence is not in money. Although I’m in favor of earning it, to get to know the world, to be curious, and so on. But everyone has their own path. Yet the point is not that, but in events, states, sensations.
We discussed a garden. You don’t feel joy because you paid the gardeners. Joy may simply come from a tree. One person looks — and experiences bliss. Another looks and thinks: “Well, a tree. Cut it down — it’ll be firewood.” This is exactly what deserves attention.
For example, I’m filming videos with my team, something goes wrong with the sound. I don’t feel a problem, stress, or anger. Although I could be angry. That is, sometimes that feeling arises, and sometimes it doesn’t.
— How can you tell whether a person’s perception is expanded at a given moment? Are there criteria?
— When you ask that question, it already has a motive: you want to reach some rung — but it doesn’t exist. There is no final point of expansion of perception. If you decide you’ve reached the end, it means you’ve stopped developing. And stopping development is degradation.
It’s important to understand: striving to expand perception for the sake of “benefits” leads down a false path. That’s not development. The only true reason is the aspiration to know the truth. To live in order to learn life.
If a person tells themselves, “I want to expand my perception in order to live better,” they’re actually heading toward degradation. The path is only possible when it’s not for oneself personally. It may be that expanding perception won’t give you any tangible “benefits” at all.
This is true human development: to live, to expand perception, to come to know your life. Not in order to live well.
And I also want to say something about perception. Knowing the truth is the hardest thing for a modern person. A person is so mired in lies that learning the truth will plunge them into a state of hell. They will feel incredibly bad because of knowing the truth. Because when a person learns the truth, they truly understand what is happening, how people deceive each other, how they manipulate. We live in a world where everyone lies.
— So what is truth then?
— That’s a fairly abstract question. If I drop the headphones and say I didn’t — that’s a lie. That’s all.
To continue what I’m saying: in learning the truth, a person sees how they were deceived since childhood, how people manipulate one another, how the government lies, how medicine is full of distortions and deception.
— And if the headphones fell and that’s how it was meant to be?
— No problem if that’s how it was meant to be. The question is: who dropped them? Don’t lie if I dropped them. Maybe it was meant to be. Don’t suffer because of it.
The problem is not that a person sometimes lies or does “bad” deeds. The question is whether they are aware of it. If they understand: “Yes, I am violating the law of the universe, and I will have to bear responsibility,” that is honesty. Even if they can’t restrain themselves: didn’t want to yell at their wife but lost it; didn’t want to curse while driving — but shouted anyway. You know you shouldn’t do that, but you can’t rid yourself of it: something inside creates such a system that you can’t come into balance with yourself. Then admit that something lives inside you — and start working with it. But don’t tell stories that this is actually a cool thing that helps you grow. Please don’t build various narratives on top of it to explain why it happened. It happened — that’s a fact, and it neither diminishes nor elevates anyone.
The question is whether a person truly wants to figure out what’s happening or not. If a person doesn’t want to understand, to look at it — then you don’t need to tell them. I often don’t answer questions at all, even when I know the answer. Because sometimes speaking means wasting energy and launching a process in the wrong direction. It’s unnecessary.
And I don’t hide that I myself have made many mistakes in life and caused plenty of harm. But that doesn’t make my life unhappy — just as good deeds don’t make it happy. All these are simply events of my life. Moreover, there is still a huge amount of time ahead.
— If a person wants to expand perception, to understand truth, to learn to see it, but they have an ego that gets in the way, and because of that they may be mistaken in thinking they understand this truth?
💡— Don’t try to resolve this question once and for all. There is no “here and now” answer. The question “what is truth?” must be asked your entire life. The problem arises when the ego demands: “Figure it out immediately so I can feel good.” That’s a trap.
To get out of it, you must admit: the world is non-material and cannot be described by material categories. Science explains a lot, but not everything. Even the simplest things — earthquakes, epidemics, wars — it cannot predict. How, then, to explain why two twins feel the world so differently? Why one wants to save animals and the other — to torment them? These are examples that may evoke strange feelings, but this is the truth of our life. It’s the only opportunity a person has. Therefore there are things one must truly engage with, not nonsense.
It’s much more important to set this question under observation every day: “What is the spiritual world?” This will lead to far greater discoveries than searching for purpose or going on retreats. It doesn’t affect the inner state. Because if there is a certain energy that will create a certain state for you, it doesn’t care: it will act as it has acted. And it can also expand — like a volcano, like a rift in the Earth, like the ocean. We can plan whatever we like, and tomorrow a wave will surge over us and simply wash everything away.
In the universe, if a person says: “We have studied and found that two million years ago such-and-such happened,” — then what do those “two million” mean if we can’t even calculate 400 years precisely? Where does this certainty come from? How was it studied? With an instrument? Tomorrow a new instrument will appear, and there will be other data. What then — should we put those who claimed the opposite earlier in prison for deception? If you follow that logic, the whole world becomes a prison.
The only thing a person can truly do is not to fight the “external prison,” but to work on themselves, on their development.
Find me at least one person who lived their life entirely “by purpose,” knew it from start to finish — and all that without spiritual description. There are none. Yes, there are people who say: “My purpose in this incarnation is to walk a certain spiritual path.” No questions to them. But show me a businessperson who fulfilled their purpose from A to Z so that it truly was their mission.
It’s easy to speak about those who have passed. People often say about Einstein: “He came up with a theory, so that was his purpose.” But if he himself heard that, he might have felt unpleasant. He would say: “I don’t agree. There were many other things in my life you don’t even know about. And you imposed a label on me.”
That’s precisely why we see billionaires who, at a certain stage of life, no longer talk about their purpose as “building a company,” but about how they now want to help children in Africa or spend time with family. That is, even they themselves, years later, understand that their path cannot be reduced only to business.
Look at Bill Gates. He’s giving away his fortune not to develop Microsoft, but to help children in Africa. At the same time, he admits he regrets not spending enough time with family and kids. So what was his purpose? Business? Charity? Family? These questions have no simple answer. Moreover, even such people make mistakes, bringing both benefit and destruction. Vaccines, computers — no one knows what will ultimately prove to be a blessing and what a ruin.
And also, look: if a person got lost for 50 years, why did they suddenly decide that at 51 they’ll stop being lost? Where would the strength come from? Obviously, the one who hasn’t been lost for decades is stronger than the one who tries to pull themselves together only in maturity.
Life is short. I’m 42: for 20 years I was a kid, and about 20 years now are my adult, self-made life. If I’ve lived these 20 years consciously, then by human logic I am stronger than someone who made 50 billion dollars but lived only one conscious year out of their 30 adult years. I personally don’t see it that way, but that’s how people reason. They start measuring “life harmony” by the amount of money, not by inner state.
I had a partner — a very wealthy person. And acquaintances, also well-known businesspeople, asked me: “What does your partner think about spiritual development?” I asked what difference it made. And they immediately wanted to back my words with his authority, because he has a lot of money. As if money confirms truth. But if we look honestly, what parameters are we relying on? Money? Achievements? Science? Or is strength based on something else? Sooner or later everyone will have to admit to themselves what their strength is actually based on and where their priorities lie.
Therefore, whether to listen to someone or not depends only on whether your values align. If you don’t truly want to see what’s happening in another person’s life, you look for excuses. But any strong psychotherapist will say: “Why are you trying to be like them? Look at how your life is arranged in other aspects. Don’t get too close, so you don’t catch the hell that exists next to them.” And if you do approach, do it consciously — for a specific question, and be in “fifty spacesuits” so as not to absorb everything else.
Otherwise it turns into manipulation and life from the ego. And that is lies and deception.
— People who believe in purpose often turn to astrology: they analyze a natal chart and get from an astrologer an answer about their purpose. Is that also an illusion?
— It’s very important to understand what exactly is meant by this word. People often call “purpose” certain tasks of their life, their path. That’s normal: everyone has tasks. I, for example, have children, and I bear responsibility for them. In theory I could refuse, but in fact I must feed them and care for their health. These are simply tasks that must be carried out.
But “purpose” in the deep sense is the ultimate task of a human being. If by this word one means value orientations, meanings of life, the laws of the Universe — no problem. Yes, there are laws of the Universe. Yes, there are true orientations. Yes, there’s a distinction between truth and lies. There are levels where this distinction doesn’t exist, but there are levels where it’s fundamental: the headphones are either in the hands or on the table. We shouldn’t drift into empty abstraction.
💡The Universe is arranged so that it doesn’t matter which path a person takes — in the end, there will still be a turn. There are forces that lead into darkness, and forces that bring you back. They can intervene at any moment. That’s why it’s important to constantly seek truth and ask: why is this happening specifically?
For example, why exactly now have new AI models been invented? A person says: “I’m smart, it’s my idea.” But why did it come specifically to them and specifically now, and not 200 years ago? It’s not just a “thought from the brain.” It came from somewhere. And it’s much more interesting to look at the real causes of events: why does business work out for one person and not for another? Why do some have children and others don’t? Is it because of intelligence? “Genetics”? What genetics? Everything here is much deeper.
Take the example of a child born via IVF. From the standpoint of the material world everything is described — there are articles, studies. But the children from the earliest IVF programs are not yet 90 years old; we don’t know what will happen further. And from the viewpoint of the spiritual world, this question is even more complex. It touches inner states, subtle causes. These are truly very difficult questions.
Recently I received a comment: “You — enlightened, living in California, everything’s good for you, and I’m struggling, I’m just existing.” But how does that person know what’s really going on with me? That’s comparison. And everything in the world is built on comparisons. If people stopped comparing themselves to one another, lies, murder, and a mass of other problems would disappear.
Comparison arose from the emergence of the human “I.” Before, it didn’t exist. It gave a huge push to development. But a person does not fully realize their “I,” they are not connected with it. And this leads to the creation of powerful ego-constructions.