Finding Your Calling: What Is Left When You Strip the Stories?

On meaning, burnout, and what a conversation with a dear friend, Rumi, Viktor Frankl, and a mosquito at 3am taught me about purpose.

Today I had a conversation with a dear friend about the meaning of life. Not the polished, rehearsed version of that question, the raw one. The one that sits underneath everything we've been told about what a good life looks like. We went past the surface.

When you put away all the social pressures, all the ideas and concepts of what we have been told, the successful career (whatever success means), the life partner, the marriage, the children, and whatever else the collective has handed you as a script. What is the meaning of all of this?

What is left?

In a lot of ways, reading many texts, the answer seems to be: it is the meaning we give it.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and spent his life studying why some people find purpose and others collapse into emptiness, arrived at something similar but deeper. He argued that humanity's primary drive is not pleasure, not power, but what he called the "will to meaning." And he noticed that when meaning is absent, people fall into one of two patterns: they either do what everyone else is doing - conformism - or they do what everyone else tells them to do. Both are ways of avoiding the question rather than sitting with it.

But my friend and I went further than that. What happens when we put all the stories away? Not just the obvious ones: career, status, achievement, but all the ideas we have told ourselves? Every identity, every narrative, every belief we have borrowed from the world around us. What is left?

The philosopher Martin Heidegger spent his life exploring this question. He described how most of us live in a mode he called "The They", a state where we surrender ourselves to the world and let it matter to us in ways that cause us to evade our very selves. We live below our real possibilities, carried along by nobody in particular yet somehow controlled by everyone in general. Heidegger's invitation was not to find some hidden true self beneath the noise, but simply to choose, to take ownership of one's existence rather than letting the collective decide for you. And he believed that this kind of authentic reckoning often only happens when we confront our own finitude. Given that our time here is limited, how do we actually want to exist?

Albert Camus looked at the same question from a different angle. He called the tension between our hunger for meaning and the universe's silence "the absurd." But rather than landing in despair, he arrived somewhere surprisingly close to joy. His response to the absurd was passion, freedom, and revolt: to live fully precisely because life owes us nothing. What I find beautiful about this is that even someone who rejects the idea of transcendent meaning ends up in the same place: create, live fully, be free. The paths are different, but they seem to converge.

Finding your calling: one does not ask, one is asked.

I asked my friend what he felt his real calling was. And calling is a beautiful word. Because it does not come from manifesting, from constructing the reality you "want." It is something bigger than you. It is a pulling.

The Jungian analyst James Hollis makes what might be the sharpest distinction between ambition and calling that I have come across. He writes that for vocation, one does not ask, one is asked. And a considerable part of the meaning of one's life comes from saying yes when asked. The ego, he says, does not run life. It is the mystery of something deeper that asks us to become whole. He uses the metaphor of the acorn: the acorn is meant to be the oak tree. That is its nature. We all have a nature that seeks to unfold and express itself into the world.

Frankl said something remarkably similar. Instead of us asking life what it means, he proposed that life asks us, and we are responsible for our answer. Everyone has their own specific vocation, a concrete assignment which demands fulfilment. Not an abstract, one-size-fits-all purpose, but something intimate and particular. Something that only you can answer.

And I feel, for myself, this calling only comes to me when I am still. It comes in the moments when I allow emptiness and nothingness to be. When I remove the noise around me and listen to a quiet voice within, a voice that creates a spark, and that spark becomes a small flame. This is what makes me excited to wake up in the morning, to create for the sake of creating.

Rumi, the 13th-century poet and mystic, knew this deeply. He wrote: "I have been a seeker and I still am, but I stopped asking the books and the stars. I started listening to the teaching of my soul." And on the power of stillness itself: "Silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void, a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear."

Eckhart Tolle explores this same territory when he distinguishes between what he calls outer purpose, what we do in the world, and inner purpose, which is simply being present, being in alignment with life. His insight is that even if you achieve everything you set out to achieve externally, it will never satisfy you if you have not found that inner alignment first. Stillness and silence, he writes, create the space for paying attention and feeling a oneness with all things. The doing comes after the being.

Because you are, you matter.

The question of "why does this matter?" is one we can sit with, too. And my answer, our answer, really, from the conversation, is that we make it matter. Because you are, you matter. Literally, you are here in this material form, and that is why you matter. Nothing else is needed.

Alan Watts spent decades trying to point at this very thing. He argued that the sense of being a separate self - isolated, alone, needing to prove your worth - is a fundamental illusion. Drawing from Vedanta philosophy, he proposed that each of us is not separate from the universe but an expression of it. You are not something that came into the world. You came out of it, the way a wave comes out of the ocean. If that is true, then the question of whether you matter dissolves. You are the universe in one of its forms. Of course you matter.

Then comes the next question: if you matter, if you are here, what wants to be created through you?

There is a difference in how we create. Some people still create out of the stories they believe from outside, what "needs" to be done, what the world told them, the social pressure. It does not come from alignment. And that is why we burn out. When we create from misalignment, we burn out. We feel empty.

This is not just a feeling I have. Decades of research in psychology back this up. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan developed what is now called Self-Determination Theory, and it is one of the most replicated findings in motivation science. They showed that humans have three core psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When those needs are met, when we act from genuine choice rather than external pressure, we thrive. When they are thwarted, we experience what they clinically call "ill-being and non-optimal functioning." In simpler words: we exhaust ourselves. We lose the thread. Their research showed that controlled motivation, doing things because we feel we should, because of social expectation, because someone else defined success for us, can actually taint our feelings about the worth of the work itself. It poisons the well.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow tells the same story from a different angle. Flow is the state where we are so absorbed in what we are doing that time dissolves. Csikszentmihalyi called it "autotelic", done for the sake of doing. Not for the reward, not for the recognition. For itself. People who experience flow regularly report greater happiness, greater life satisfaction, more meaning. But when the demands exceed our resources, when we are creating from obligation rather than alignment, we do not enter flow. We enter stress. And sustained stress becomes burnout.

But aligned creation is something else entirely. You feel like something else is guiding you. Some call it source. Others call it spirit. Others call it God. The understanding from my lens is that it is all the same, we just call it something different. Words are limited when it comes to explaining the unexplainable. Rumi said it most simply: "Silence is the language of God. All else is poor translation."

But feeling this connection to something higher, that something higher working through the vessel of your human body to create something, that is a lived experience that many traditions point to, even if they name it differently.

Everything inter-is with everything else.

We are part of nature. And all of nature is perfectly harmonising when we look at it. Everything has a reason to be here. Even the small mosquito.

I looked this up one night after being attacked by one that would not let me sleep. I was lying there, genuinely wondering why these insects are even on this planet. It turns out mosquitoes are pollinators. They move pollen. They play a role in the web of life that sustains us all. Even the creature that keeps you up at three in the morning has its place in the whole.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, coined a word for this: interbeing. It is the awareness that all people, all species, all things are deeply interconnected. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything "inter-is" with everything else. He used to invite people to meditate on a simple apple, and see the rain in it, the sunshine, the soil, the farmer who planted the seed. All of it present in one small fruit. If we inter-are with all things, then our being here is already a form of participation. We do not need to earn our place. We already have one.

So by knowing this, that even the smallest part of nature has its reason, there is also a reason why you are here. Otherwise, you would not be.

The quest of life, understanding that we will not understand everything, and allowing this while still staying curious to find answers, that is a beautiful way to approach life. Frankl spoke of this when he said that we have enough to live by but too little to live for. The search itself is part of the meaning. Not the arrival. The walking.

I had a calling today to open my laptop and write about this. Nothing planned or strategic, it was a feeling, a pulling toward something I wanted to share. And so we do not have to make it complicated. Sometimes the calling is quiet. Sometimes it is just: open your laptop. Write. Share what moved you. A calling is not one answer for the rest of your life. It is a practice of listening. And what you hear may change.

My intention here is to create a dialogue. To hear your sense, your perspective on this topic. And maybe, together, to create a bigger picture, to keep putting together the puzzle of this life we share. Because in the end, we are all in this together. And maybe, by looking through each other's lenses, we can begin to see something larger than any one of us could see alone.

What does your calling feel like? I would love to hear. Share your thoughts and let's keep this conversation going.

If something in this piece stirred something in you, if you felt that quiet pull while reading, you might want to explore Breathe and Bloom. It is a program I created for exactly this: learning to listen to the stillness, finding alignment between your inner world and how you move through the outer one, and creating from that place where the spark lives. A space to come home to yourself.

Further reading for those who want to go deeper:

Viktor Frankl — Man's Search for Meaning

Eckhart Tolle — Stillness Speaks and A New Earth

James Hollis — Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Thich Nhat Hanh — The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching

Alan Watts — The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Albert Camus — The Myth of Sisyphus

Rumi — collected poetry (translations by Coleman Barks)