Does Your Career Have to Hold Your Purpose?

Living my purpose, bringing love into the spaces I move through and into the life we’re building together as a family.

So what are we actually asking our careers to do?

Many of us treat our careers as an existential container: a place where identity, meaning, and purpose are all meant to converge. 

It’s a beautiful idea, and an impossible standard. Yet, many high-achievers have built their lives around it. It’s a substantial burden to place on a job – even one you’re well-suited for – because it changes the role from something you do, into something that has to define you.Not long ago, work had very little to do with purpose at all. It was a way to contribute, to earn a living. Which makes the question difficult to ignore: does your career actually have to hold your purpose?

How this actually shows up

For some people, the search for “purpose” becomes an ongoing saga of trying to find the “right” work: something that will finally feel aligned, meaningful enough. For others, it’s less clear.

Something in their work just feels off, and they start adjusting around it: working longer, striving for the next promotion, trying to get it right, never quite resolving it. What’s often underneath both is the same dynamic: work has become the primary place people look for a sense of purpose.

One client came to me describing what she assumed was a work-life balance issue. She was driven, responsible, and highly effective. The kind of person who becomes indispensable in most environments (and then pays for it in the long run).

She wasn’t looking to leave her job. She was looking, in her words, to feel less compressed inside it. What became clear over time was that the role itself was not the primary issue. It was the way she was inhabiting it, and what she was asking it to hold.

Her orientation to work was structured around proving (long hours, constant responsiveness, a form of vigilance that rarely powered down). It looked like commitment and it felt like pressure. A familiar combination, especially when work is carrying more than just the work itself.

But she didn’t leave her job. We worked together to change her relationship to it.

She began working fewer hours (even as that felt terrifying). She stopped responding to emails and Slack in the evenings. She allowed her life to widen slightly beyond the edges of her work: time with friends, walking her dog in the middle of the day. She took a glass-blowing class, started kayaking on weekends, went out on weeknight evenings for dinners and stayed fully there instead of half in her inbox.

Small, seemingly ordinary choices that, taken together, changed the texture of her days in ways that were anything but small. And if you think these choices feel obvious or simple to make, I invite you to consider telling any high-achieving professional to “work less” and see what changes.

This wasn’t an easy shift. It was placing a bet on herself in a way that she hadn’t before.

To her surprise, the perception of her performance at work improved (and it was already excellent). She was promoted. She got a raise. The environment around her began to recalibrate. Nothing about the role changed, but it was no longer carrying the full weight of her sense of purpose and identity.

Purpose is less containable than we’d like it to be

In my experience, purpose is not particularly well-contained. It doesn’t confine itself neatly to a role or a title. It moves. I tend to think of my own sense of purpose in relatively simple terms: to bring love into the spaces I move through.

It takes one shape in my work. And it takes another in entirely ordinary moments: the pickup line, the library, a brief interaction with another person that carries no formal significance and will not be recorded anywhere.

There’s a concept in Japan, ikki no mei, which translates loosely to one small reason to live one more day. The emphasis is not on identifying a singular, overarching purpose, but on orienting toward something specific enough to return to. A cup of tea, a conversation, a small act of usefulness.

Meaning, in that context, is not something you discover once and then sustain indefinitely; it’s something you cultivate.

And it’s often less conceptual than we expect.

It shows up in how something feels to move through. Where there is a sense of engagement. Where there is a softening, or a kind of pull to return.

What becomes possible when you stop asking your career to be everything

Work can absolutely function as an expression of purpose. For some, it needs to. But it was never designed to contain the entirety of it.

When that expectation is placed on a career, it begins to distort the way you interpret your experience inside it. Every fluctuation feels consequential. Every doubt feels like a verdict. And there isn’t any room in your life for much else. 

When it is loosened, something shifts.

You stop asking your career to define you, and begin to notice where meaning is already present in other aspects of your life. You see more clearly what your work is actually offering, and what it is not meant to provide.

And from there, the question becomes simpler and more precise: Where do I already feel engaged in my life? And what role does my work play in that? Because purpose is not something your career contains, it’s something that exists across your life. And your work is simply one place where it has the opportunity to take shape.

A different way to orient around purpose

One of the ways I think about purpose is less about identifying the “right” answer, and more about orienting toward what actually matters in the context of a full life.

There’s a particular lens I sometimes use with clients that tends to bring this into sharper focus: imagining yourself at the end of your life, and reflecting on what you would want to be true. Lying on your deathbed, hopefully surrounded by loved ones, what do you hope will be true then?

What will your life look like in reflection? This reflection tends to surface something broader and simpler. What feels meaningful. What feels worth giving your attention to. What you want your life to reflect.

From that place, decisions about work tend to become clearer. The pressure shifts and the question becomes more precise and easier to work with.

If you’d like a structured way to explore this, I’ve put together a short reflection you can use. Downloadthe Life Reflection Exercise Here.