The fraudulence of a life purpose
What? You didn’t think I was only going to talk about my bike tour for the next four months, did you? 
Hayden, at Persistent Illusion, wrote a remarkable article. Somewhat casually, she cracked away at the shell of a very, very big egg. After several hours of preparing a very precise comment, I stopped and asked myself a silly question: “Am I spending several hours on a comment?” That was when I realized I was really making a full article, which is ironically the fitting comment that her article deserves. Let’s see if we can help crack that damn egg wide open.
She begins by explaining her desire to become a life-coach:
I’ve thought about being a life coach and, in some ways, what I do here at PersistentIllusion is a form of ‘life coaching’.
Would I love to sit down with people and talk about what is going on in their lives? Absolutely! Do I adore the idea of helping people make positive changes for a passionate life? Of course I do! Am I a fan of using technology for sustainable life changes? So much so that we hope to roll out the website by August.
She then goes on to describe something unsavory that she detects which dilutes the pleasure she might enjoy by pursuing her hope to be a life-coach:
I think life coaching, however, has turned into something of an insidious, though wholely unintended, multi-level marketing scheme.
“I want to live my purpose therefore I become a life coach to help others live their purpose.”
Somehow it doesn’t make any sense to me. I guess the term I want is “self-cannibalizing”. What happens when everyone becomes a life coach to live their purpose? Who’s left to get coached? Then what will all the life coaches do?
What I would do if everyone lived their passion? That, I think, would be my ultimate purpose.
In other words, she tells us that if what she wants to do is guilty of the charges she brings against it, then she may not want to do what she wants to do. To answer her dilemma, I need to bring some reinforcements. However, I suppose I should spell a warning beforehand — the reinforcements I need to bring are philosophical ones. Some of you have noticed that I never talk philosophy here, which could be strange because it constitutes the fundamental nature of everything me. It’s what I intend to do as a career, it’s what I know beyond everything else I know and it’s the primary filter through which I color everything in my life in all respects. Nothing short of that. However, I swore myself an oath early on not to bring philosophy up. Why? Because most people would disembark from these pages the moment I brought it up. The reason for that is because in my experience, no one presents philosophy correctly. Because of that, most readers have a preconceived recognition of what they think philosophy is (useless), and yawn off to another site as soon as they see it. To quickly conclude my defense, let me assure you that any philosophy you might occasionally find here is of a wholly different order.
Enough of that. We’re here to rescue Hayden’s dream. To do that, I’d like to make use of Plato. Hayden’s desire to pursue life-coaching rests on the solution to the accusation that life-coaching is an insidious, multi-level marketing scheme that is self-cannibalizing. Those three accusations are really only one. It would be insidious if it was a multi-level marketing scheme, and it would be that if it was self-cannibalizing, and knew it. In other words, it would be a fraud if its “end” was also its “means” to its own “end,” if its fulfillment depended on its not being fulfilled in the first place.
Life-coaching is not unique in this sense. She acknowledges that with the use of financial planning as a career in a response to a comment to her article. There are as many examples as there are careers, actually. Here is another example familiar to us all: doctoring. We all know it well. I went to a dermatologist earlier this year because I was developing hive-like symptoms over much of my body and they weren’t going away even after several weeks. When I arrived to tell her about my symptoms, instead of her asking me careful questions designed to determine if I was having an allergy or some other reaction, she pumped out a “script” every time I used an adjective. I walked out of there with a handful of prescriptions all written on a pad (provided by Pfizer) after which she cut me off in the parking lot on her own way out driving her BMW. I still didn’t know what I was suffering from. None of them worked, I stopped taking them, and the symptoms cleared up after I fasted. We can all imagine other scenarios, such as a doctor recommending a long regiment of medicine, numerous (superfluous) CAT scans, X-rays and tests because you have a cold. Meanwhile, the doctor gets a cut, and gets to walk through a 20 million dollar lobby every morning on his way into work (a lobby all the sick patients in their beds never get to see except on their way out). In other words, doctors earn pretty high salaries. They swear by the doctrine of health, but they practice another doctrine too. Their motives can be mixed. What if doctors were fully successful in their endeavor to cure disease? They would be out of business. No more BMWs.
Where does Plato help? He helps because he allows his students to recognize a simple, fundamental truth we have in our society. Money. He permits us to recognize, besides all the many “arts” we can each pursue, a separate art that is often not viewed directly as an art. When a doctor practices medicine, she is practicing the art of medicine. It is a pure and very precise art. However, there is another art that travels with all other arts, the “art” of money-making. There are exceptionally few practiced arts, or human acts in general, that do not have the money-making art as a close companion. The big question is, once we are granted the privilege of seeing both arts being practiced at the same time, which art are we really practicing? Can the two arts be separated in such a way so as to salvage the true art we practice? Can our passions still be the artistic pursuits that made us passionate about them?
You bet. But only for those who are truly passionate about the arts they practice. The unsavory response we passionate ones can detect is strictly a consequence of an imperfect world. The purity of our passions, Hayden, allows us the privilege to taste the impurities in which we are constantly submerged. A natural consequence of life, is to live, in the world we live, a world that is innocently inhospitable to human beings, but not to other animals. What separates us as human beings is our ability to comprehend our state of affairs, to various degrees depending on our natures. Your nature gives you greater comprehension. That comprehension allows you two things: the ability to acknowledge the “lie” and the responsibility then, to live your life in accord with your private understanding of what is not a lie. Your passions will become self-cannibalizing only when you pursue them under the light and with the breath of an art for which you have no passion. Can you practice your passion with purity, while practicing another art, sustaining your livelihood? Yes, and you can have confidence in that because you asked the question in the first place. In other words, the people who cannot conquer your dilemma are the ones who never see it as a dilemma. Go practice your art, know your art, love your art and pursue it with the zeal of a lover, loving your beloved.
Now that we’ve cracked open the egg, is what we’ve found inside, rotten? The egg we cracked is so remarkable because in the process of cracking open the egg to investigate its interior, what we discover is that the egg we cracked is our interior. Whatever fraudulence we might detect in the pursuit of our passions is a fraudulence only to the degree that we each make it fraudulent. Read this carefully: Life purposes are frauds only to the frauds. To those whose concern for cannibalization overshadows the origin of the spirit from which the passion first flowed.
Can practicing an art then, truly cannibalize the art? Yes, but in only one way. We will cannibalize the art we practice if we practice another art and mistake it for the art we truly want to practice. If we practice the art of life-coaching without divorcing from that art (at least in our mind’s eye), the art of making a living; if we, in other words, mistake the latter for the former. Can you practice your art without any restraint, but temper or moderate the secondary (and fully necessary) art of money-making? If so, then you’ll always know that the art you love is the Master art, the art you can express as the one that composes your life, your hopes, the art that is really you, because you god damn say it is; you know it, breath it, are it. At that point of perfect human goodness, and purity, we then find out that the egg we cracked is filled with nothing short of what we put in it.
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Another great post my friend.
To me the most vital component of what you are describing is honesty with oneself.
So many of us lie to ourselves about our true motives or desires. We are unhappy with that paths we have taken so we dupe ourselves into believing that the new boat or car or house or spouse is what we are really after. In our purest moments of honesty many of us would admit to ourselves and anyone who would listen that we know that more (fill in the blank) won’t really make us happy.
And yet we are rarely ever that open with ourselves - its as if we think that if we don’t audibly or consciously acknowledge something than it doesn’t really exist.
There are plenty of people out there who chose to be lawyers or doctors etc for the money and, as a result they are miserable. There are also individuals out there who honestly assessed their passions, realized that what they dreamed of doing probably wouldn’t lead to great financial riches and headed down that path, eyes wide open knowing full well that being wealthy in life has little to do with money.
Hayden - to echo Dereck’s point - do what you dream of doing, not as a means to an end but as the end itself. If end = living your life in a way that maximizes your fulfillment and helping others identify and fulfill their dreams =’s maximum fulfillment for you than any other consideration is insignificant in comparison.
I’ve had to read and reread this article - like seven times already. I read it and come back to it and read it and come back to it and do it all over again the next day.
“We’re here to rescue Hayden’s dream.”
I don’t know how I could have been so oblivious to this, but you and the rest of my readers sure weren’t. Ya’ll jumped all over my ‘anti-life coach’ post with a vengeance.
That’s when I realized that the underlying presumption I had was that people who were trying to live their purpose became life coaches to help other people find their purpose.
Gee, Hayden, not everyone wants to do that, DUH. I realized that the mere fact of that assumption, meant that I wanted to become a life coach and help other people live their purpose.
So that’s where I’m at. I can’t thank you enough for writing this.