Your Personal Occam's Razor

“The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.”

One of the best parts of gaining a clearer sense of your purpose is how much easier it becomes to say no to most things—so that you can say yes to the few things you must.

There is no vacillating, no menu anxiety over the choices of life. There is a sense of duty around which everything else falls into place, and the "wanna hop on Zoom?" requests are quickly put into perspective.

For those without a strong sense of purpose yet, the best place to start may be with the incarnate realities you are already immersed in. I think of someone who, like my father, knew that being a good dad was one of his fundamental responsibilities and said no to anything that got in the way of it. Or someone given custody of a precious ring, who must evaluate everything that comes his way in light of the mission.

Without a clear sense of purpose, everything is "just an opportunity." But the whole world is full of opportunities. Very few are ones that you or I should be pursuing.

How should an opportunity be evaluated? In financial terms? By its capacity for growth and learning? By professional prestige? Risk versus reward? Its propensity to allow for "human flourishing"?

The less specificity we have about who we are, about the unique circumstances we find ourselves in, and about the particular word our lives cry out for us to speak—a word which, if left unsaid, will be lost to the world forever—the more prone we are to evaluate opportunities in abstract and impersonal ways.

This lack of self-knowledge makes it easier to convince oneself that adopting a new ideology, or making a lateral move to a company with better perks, or adding another degree to our quiver, is really the answer.

With confusion comes imitation. If you are lost in a fog, you follow the first warm body you can find.

The ways most people are coping with the uncertainty of our moment—finding tribes, consuming more content—lack the specificity of the particular questions each of us must answer.

For a woman who has lost her child, the shape of her hope is the specific face of the child she hopes to be reunited with one day.

For those who have lived through particular traumas, there is a personalized healing that needs to happen—nobody’s story has ever been quite like theirs.

And for those who want to do something good for humanity, hundreds of things will be proposed—every cause, every movement, every banner will be offered to you. Without a sense of the particularities of their life and their responsibilities, they will be swallowed up in Merton’s nondescript sea. Mimesis wins.

The problems of today’s world are the problems of purposeless people with thin desires, looking for anything solid to hold onto in the tumultuous seas of liquid modernity.

It’s funny that progress in life tends to manifest as a deep, refreshing, almost comical realization that something I thought was important is not. That’s somewhat terrifying, because it makes me wonder what kind of nonsense I’m consumed with now that I’ll look back on five or ten years from now and be ashamed of.

Yet we have to go through the thin to get to the thick. We have to watch bad movies to know a good one when we see it; we have to drink mediocre wines; most of us have to date people we will not one day marry; we must go through adolescence to reach adulthood. The key is learning to tell one desire from another—to develop a hermeneutic, an interpretive key, by which to judge these experiences in the first place.

But to have such a key—the kind that helps us identify which experiences are worthy of thickening and which we can safely let go of—one would need to have had at least some taste of the transcendence that corresponds to the deepest desires of the human heart. Experiences of truth, of beauty, of goodness, of justice, of being "at home" (like the Shire in The Lord of the Rings), of some radiant splendor capable of capturing the imagination. These external mediators of transcendence are essential.

Then it is lost in the sea of the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent, forever.

But the spirit still hovers over those waters, too.