Purpose and Paychecks
I have a prominent role in the enterprise operations of a Fortune 100 Company and work independently with no micromanagement. I am often recognized for the creativity in my work while receiving accolades and connections that allow me to continue progressing in my career. I’m very thankful for this. Yet, at the same time, I can’t help but feel my purpose is being underutilized. While I’m humbled to see my work generate a positive impact in a cross-functional manner, I dedicate such a small percentage of my passion and intuition towards it.
I can’t help but think — am I growing as a person at the rate I’m growing in my career, my recognition, or my financial position as a young man? I consider myself very multifaceted through virtue of persona and experience. Yet, I feel I’m devoting less time to the passions that make me that person — which is why I wrote this at 1 AM on a Monday night.
A passion I’ve always had is to write. Irrespective of topic, for me, writing has always felt like less of an activity and more of a state of mind in which I can inhale experience and exhale a voice which transcends the words it is formatted in. The essence of such liberation today is translating the battle of my unorthodox, multifaceted cognitive tendencies against the structured lifestyle of an individual generating income through a demanding “career”.
My mind is built to innovate, and to a prominent extent, my career encourages me to do so. In an industry like technology, your productivity ultimately generates change for key elements of human life in unprecedented facets. You are challenged to innovate daily at a high level. This innovation intertwines with the robust set of complications which exist in multi-billion dollar enterprises. Despite working through arduous bureaucratic structures, volatile demand shifts, and sudden prioritization pivots — these aforementioned obstacles are meant to be navigated with a finesse that doesn’t compromise pace, direction, or vision. I see it as trying to get to a destination in a severe time pinch, swerving narrowly through lanes without de-accelerating. It’s not necessarily a pleasant feeling, it’s not delivering much value to me as a person, shit, it’s not even really something that makes me feel fulfilled — but, it’s a demonstration of what the fuck my mind can do with so many circumstances pinned against me. And the effect works — the dopamine my mind gets from this is crash-course innovation is wild, I’m H-I-M bruh!
However, while the activity of this ‘innovation’ stimulates my mind, I can’t help but feel that the framework of this very innovation is antithetical to my existence as a person. While innovation can, and often does, produce output that results in monetary gain — the essence of innovation stems from the raw intellectual curiosity within human nature. This innovation that I’m executing daily is a simulated action that isn’t initiated through my natural inhibitions. It’s to solve deep-rooted business problems preventing millions of dollars worth of profit for a company generating billions of dollars worth of net profit. I’m going to avoid the saturated rhetoric that working in a corporation ends up profiting someone else more than the employees doing the work… We all know that, thanks for the memo IG FOREX billionaires. Rather, I aim to focus on the state of being this causes for myself, in a human sense.
As mentioned, as a 22 year-old youth, I actually enjoy my work. It stimulates my critical thinking capacity. On top of that, I stand out in my personality. I was never groomed for this shit, I’m a first-generation third world youth with some extremely ignorant tendencies. Yet, I don’t deviate from my personality to be heard, nor do I kiss ass to be recognized. At the core, this shit is straight business at the speed of a McLaren GT, and I fucking love sitting in the driver’s seat. I talk my shit in meetings with pretty big dogs in Silicon Valley, and I do it with swag. I get to benefit from luxuries I would never imagine experiencing during my childhood as the eldest son of first-generation immigrants from Pakistan, via slight abuse of corporate expense reimbursement tools. Honestly speaking, these are all experiences that tremendously stimulate my mind — personifying the notion of individual talent being rewarded with the “status” oriented amenities which orchestrate the capitalist symphony that America is.
Despite that, holistically speaking, I feel that I am impeding my growth as an individual. I hold the human experience to be internally determined by the independent, yet optimally synchronous entities of the mind, heart, and soul. I feel that these entities within me are not just out of sync, but are now being pulled in opposing directions. In my daily life, my mind is being fed through virtue of exercise and experience, yet my heart and soul are left starving with a lack of connection to the activities that consume so much of my time. Time itself is a man-measured concept, broken in units to help us humans comprehend the impact of its essence. However, living in the modern world, specifically in America, and principally so in the Silicon Valley tech world — time is intertwined with monetary activity so much that it has become its own currency.
Where the mind can be molded in order to satisfy the rapid-paced demands of this currency — the heart and soul are more honest entities within my realm of consciousness. They don’t view time as a currency, they view time as a partner to foster elements of growth. They don’t feel connected to the activity, nor are they interested in dedicating time towards the insatiable cycle of monetary gain. The greater strides I make, the more I realize that my heart is increasingly longing to evoke my purpose as a human, while my soul rejects principles of the validation that my mind continues to accept.
As a human, I am not serving my purpose for existing. I am simply capitalizing upon the qualities that God blessed me with, and exerting them towards a limited framework of worldly advancement. I don’t seek those worldly ends, they don’t mean shit to me. However, they are so deeply tied to the activity that I exert a significant portion of my time to, that they have become intertwined with my mental stimulation. But where does this mental stimulation lead me?
No matter how much I achieve in this world, it won’t mean a single thing if my relationship with my heart, soul, and ultimately, my Creator, is compromised. A human feeling self-satisfaction with mere mental stimulation in the face of a starved soul is analogous to citizens of a country feeling satisfaction with their leader, because he built a bus service while those citizens continued suffering from hunger, poverty, and a lack of opportunity. Damn, this shit got me talking Pakistani politics, I’m down bad.
Now what was the point of me writing this? You’re probably thinking, “Ok bruh, you talked about your corporate experience, innovation, threw in some automotive metaphors, and now you’re talking about your mind vs your heart and soul… Are you coming down off mushrooms? Should we call Logic’s suicide hotline?” I get it, it’s a decent amount to unpack. So far, I’ve heavily broken down how I have deviated from my purpose, without giving much insight as to what exactly that purpose is.
Let’s start generally — a significant portion of your purpose for existence is the actual process of learning what your purpose is, how it relates to your individuality, and why that purpose was given to you. It’s not black and white, you aren’t spoon fed the answers on a silver platter. Yet in a world where we ignore the virtue of journey for the lust-filled anticipation of destination, this process reinforces the beauty of purpose. The essence of this is intrinsic growth. From an outside observation, my personality as a child was completely different than what it is now. Yet at the core, I am the same person. Intrinsically, I love to learn and have my soul interact with this world via means of creativity. While creativity, ironically, is generally only associated with artistic outlets in mass rhetoric — the true beauty of creativity is the essence of its existence in every single facet of human life.
The purpose of me writing this isn’t to be cynical, nor is it to highlight a problem and mention there is no solution to it. I believe you can maintain mental stimulation through the worldly framework, while consciously fostering growth via your heart and soul. It’s possible, we can all do it, I’ve been there and I long to return there for good. However, a true issue lies in the human treatment of the heart and the soul. This is deeply intertwined with the treatment of time as a currency for means of chasing, rather than a partner for means of reflection.
Today’s world discourages prioritization, or even acknowledgement of the heart and the soul. Most humans discard consciousness of these entities in a misconstrued notion that they are weaknesses which slow down the pursuit of mental stimulation. While an individual’s heart and soul call for holistic internal reflection, this world encourages individuals to pursue a lifestyle geared towards external validation. Ultimately, this causes humans to seek stimulation of the mind’s most easily corrupted component, the ego. Once you follow this route, you become a slave to the complexities of the outside world and ultimately lose sight of your own natural inhibitions, AKA who the fuck you really are.
I wrote this to revitalize what is important to me as a human, while evoking readers to assess what they are dedicating their time to, and whether they feel their mind, heart, and soul are in sync with their purpose. In a worldly sense, I have a lot more that I want to accomplish. I’m humbled to be where I am, yet I feel I’m not even close to maximizing what God has blessed me with.
However, my metric for achievement is misguided if simplistically measured by worldly output. My metric for achievement is the holistic self-assessment of my growth as an individual, which allows me to contribute to this world in a way nobody else can. This growth is a life-long journey, with a destination that transcends worldly boundaries. As long as I exist, this growth will be confronted by the questions that challenge my existence daily. Yet that confrontation fuels the innate purpose we hold as humans. As Momin Khawaja, the biggest favor I can do myself is to understand that the answers exist within me, but cannot be comprehended by the mind itself.
