Is purpose needed?

Most confused about the concept of purpose. Does it occur to all that anything you do needs to have a purpose? Or was it drilled into my head by the circumstances which I came from, mid-class, working class, small town, convent educated, do these all scream no fun diktat to life? You are quite right, in the above-mentioned upbringing, you are always striving for something, so where do you think you would have time to think otherwise? So it all goes by the Maslow principle I guess when in the bottom rung, you are striving. Not that I had a no-food upbringing that I had to strive for food, but any luxury anytime was never thought of as something which can be had. So the luxury of time to just be and enjoy wasn't a concept. And hence smelling the roses, and looking at sunrise moments was not something which were familiar. As Maslow correctly points out only when your basics are covered would it occur to you to look at esteem, self actualizations, and such to be your purpose to strive for.

But you being on social media, especially on platforms like Linkedin, the need for purpose is quite brought to the fore by most of these new age gurus. You are in a stage where you are still not clear if you have your basics covered yet, and you are searching for purpose. Because the new age guru whom you are following, which changes every other month depending on who is trending, asks you to do things with intent and purpose and also says you need to enjoy it as well. So now your Maslow first stepper wants to skip the other steps and want to find the purpose of your life. And the media makes you believe that if you haven't found it yet, you are a big dud… failure! Now adding a new dimension to this whole confusion is the comparison game, a peer of yours left it all (which means whatever he might have been doing in the software industry, which you are grinding in and went ahead and found a career in fashion) or many more such purpose-achieved souls around becomes samples for comparison. And here you still grappling to know if your friendship with yourself and others, your sense of connection which is an important part of Mr. Maslow's step towards growth is something that you haven't figured out. You are still people-pleasing and still don't know if you did something for yourself or others only. And now you are hammered by the big Q, what's the purpose

I had to strike a chord with myself through these struggles to kind of understand this concept, that till I find it, or even if I find it at all, the purpose could be to accept the idiosyncracies of myself and give myself time to be and discover each moment's purpose before I get the big picture. I think most of us aren't grown enough to know the big picture and when it is time we would too. And let me attribute this small realization to end less therapy sessions and my kind therapist, who in the first session brought me to the point of seeing the “NOW”, which was painful and continued to be so for quite a while. But she is relentless, she kept on sneaking in this concept quite a number of times, so in your less-painful times, you tend to consider.