Essay 17 - Personal Candidates for Cultivation

If you are more individualistic than social, then joining an organization with a mission may not be right for you. But that does not mean your life must be devoid of meaning. If you are reading this, you are a human being and part of the species of human beings. The species has a long history and, some would say, an evolutionary mission (I will pick this up in a later essay so just go with it for now). In this evolutionary journey we have developed archetypes of human experience to help us understand ourselves and the great variety of other people. There is a vast and varied literature on archetypes which I will grossly oversimplify in the next essay. But for now, let us pick a few obvious ones such as hero or flawed hero or troublemaker or caretaker.

These archetypes are recognizable patterns of behavior. They are ways in which people tend to behave or patterns into which the variety of human behavior can be sorted. Archetypes are represented repeatedly in myths, parables, legends, and stories. If one recognizes an archetype in a character in a story, we have learned something important about that character. And if we recognize something of our self in an archetype, we have learned something important about our self. Granted we all have our hero days and our troublemaker days. But persistent archetype patterns will reoccur repeatedly and allow us to get insight into a satisfying purpose.

That is, rather than deriving purpose from an organization, you derive purpose from an archetype that helps you make sense out of your experiences. And making sense out of your experiences through the organizing purpose of an archetype puts you on the road to greater meaning.

This essay is 297 words long and the audio is about 2 3/4 minutes.