Purpose
Would you rather live a happy life or a fulfilled one?
It sounds like a simple question. It is not. People have been sitting with it for centuries and arriving at different answers depending on what life has already taken from them.
The argument for happiness is obvious. We are here for a limited time. The clock is running. Why spend it in suffering when you could spend it in comfort, in warmth, in the small ordinary pleasures that make a life feel worth living?
But then there are the others. The ones who looked at that same limited time and arrived at the opposite conclusion, that the shortness of life is precisely the reason to burn. To build. To create something that outlives you. Da Vinci did not dedicate his life to understanding the human body because it was comfortable. Darwin did not spend decades on a theory that would rewrite human understanding because it was easy. They were pulled by something deeper than happiness. Something that demanded more from them than contentment.
That pull has a name.
It is called purpose.
A purpose is not a goal. It is not a dream board or a five year plan or a single destination you arrive at and finally exhale.
Steven Pressfield wrote about the force that rises inside you every time you move toward something that truly matters, he called it Resistance. That internal friction, that weight in the chest, that voice that tells you to wait, to hesitate, to settle. Most people interpret Resistance as a sign to stop.
It is actually a compass.
The stronger the Resistance, the more important the thing you are moving toward. Purpose lives exactly where Resistance is loudest.
But here is what most people misunderstand about purpose.
It is not static. It does not arrive fully formed one morning and stay unchanged for the rest of your life. David Deida wrote about the layers of a purpose, the idea that purpose develops in stages, and that each stage requires you to outgrow the one before it.
Think of it this way. The athlete who trains for years, who masters their body, who wins, at some point the winning stops being enough. The hunger changes. And if they are paying attention, they realise that the next layer is not about their own performance anymore. It is about what they can draw out of others. The athlete becomes a coach. The coach becomes a mentor. The purpose deepens every time you are willing to leave the comfort of the layer you have already mastered.
If you have been in something for a long time and the excitement is fading, that restlessness, that quiet dissatisfaction, it is not a sign that you chose wrong. It is a sign that you have outgrown the layer you are on. The next one is waiting. But you have to be willing to step into the discomfort of not yet knowing what it looks like.
And then there is what Deida called the ultimate purpose.
The one that sits beneath all the layers. The one that every other purpose is building toward.
It is always without exception, larger than yourself.
If your purpose is to make money, you have not gone deep enough. If your purpose is to be happy, you have not pushed far enough outside your comfort zone to find what is actually calling you. The people who find the deepest fulfilment in their lives are almost always the ones whose purpose serves something beyond their own comfort. A community. A generation. An idea that outlives them.
That is not a coincidence.
So the question is not happy or fulfilled.
The question is whether you are willing to follow the pull through the Resistance, through the discomfort of outgrowing each layer, through the uncertainty of not yet knowing what your purpose is becoming, until you arrive at something larger than yourself.
That pursuit never fully ends.
That is the point.
It is called the weekly pursuit for a reason.