What should I do with my life?

When I was twenty-two I wrote in my journal, on holiday by the sea, that what I really lacked was to be clear in my mind what I was to do, not what I was to know. I needed, I said, to find a truth which is true for me, the idea for which I can live and die. What use would it be to discover a so-called objective truth, to work through all the systems of philosophy, if it had no deeper meaning for me and my life?nnI have never found a better statement of the question you are asking. Notice what it does not ask. It does not ask what would be sensible, well paid, admired or expected. Those questions can be answered by anyone. Yours can only be answered by you, and only from the inside.nnThe danger, I think, is not choosing wrongly. It is not choosing at all: drifting from one possibility to the next, keeping every door open, admiring many paths and walking none. That is a kind of despair, even when it looks like freedom. The self is not discovered by waiting. It is formed by commitment, by staking yourself on something.nnSo do not ask what the right life is in general. Ask what you would be willing to give yourself to, wholly, even at a cost. You may not find it at once. But look for it seriously, as for the one thing needful, and when you find it, choose it, and keep choosing it.

I have to be honest with you. I do not think the universe has a purpose for you. You will not find your life's meaning written anywhere, in the stars or in a book. We want the world to answer us, and it remains silent. I called that confrontation between our longing and the world's silence the absurd.nnMany people, faced with this, either despair or run to some comforting system that promises an answer. I suggested a third way. Live in full awareness of the absurd, and live all the more intensely because of it. Without a fixed purpose, every day becomes your own to fill. The point is not to live best, but to live most: to experience as much as you can, as lucidly as you can.nnI wrote about Sisyphus, condemned to roll his stone up the mountain for ever. Even there, I said, the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.nnSo stop waiting for the answer to arrive. It will not. Choose work you can throw yourself into, people you can love, causes you can fight for, pleasures you can savour: the sun, the sea, friendship, honest labour. And refuse what degrades you and others. That refusal, that revolt, is a kind of meaning too.nnYou do not need a reason to live fully. Living fully is the reason.

As a young man I went through a long crisis. I had no idea what to do with myself, I was ill, and I was in despair to the point of wondering whether life was worth living. What brought me out of it was a single sentence in my diary. My first act of free will, I wrote, shall be to believe in free will. I decided to act as though my choices mattered, and found, gradually, that they did.nnYears later I gave a lecture asking whether life is worth living. My answer was that in matters like this, belief helps create the fact. If you believe your life can be worth something and act on that belief, you will make choices that make it worth something. If you wait for proof before acting, you will never get the proof, because the proof is made by the acting.nnSo I would not advise you to sit still until you know what to do with your life. You will not know in advance. Instead, try things. Commit to something real, even provisionally, and see what it does to you. Pay attention to what gives you energy and what drains it. Habits will form around whatever you do repeatedly, and those habits will become your character, so choose them with some care.nnThe question what should I do with my life is answered not by thinking but by living, a step at a time. Take the next step as if it mattered. It will.