I don't believe we can make survival the sole purpose of our lives. And I don't believe that living as long as possible can be the ultimate goal either.
If that had been my purpose, I probably would have lived very differently. I would have focused primarily on security, protection, and comfort. I would have avoided many difficult questions, and perhaps I would never have studied as much as I did. Above all, I would not have spent so many years trying to answer the most uncomfortable question of all:
Why are we here?
Because survival is necessary, but it is not enough.
There are millions of people in the world for whom survival is already an achievement. People who do not have enough to eat, who live through war, who have been forced from their homes, who struggle every day to give their children what others take for granted. They do not necessarily have the luxury of constantly asking what life means. Under those circumstances, survival is already a tremendous goal.
But once survival itself is no longer in question, the question comes back.
Now that I'm alive, what am I supposed to do with my life?
Because wanting to keep living is one thing. Knowing why you want to live is another.
Survival Is a Condition, Not a Direction
Making survival your only project means, in a sense, navigating by sight alone. You react to whatever happens, chase whatever demands your attention, avoid danger, look for the next small gratification, and keep postponing the fundamental question.
You can live that way for years without ever seriously asking where you are going.
And this is where I think we make a fundamental mistake: we confuse goals with purpose.
We can have a house to buy, a salary to increase, a promotion to earn, a trip to take, a body to improve, a bank account to build, a relationship to find, or a social position to achieve. All of these are legitimate goals.
But how much of what we pursue actually represents our direction in life, and how much is simply the desire of the moment?
We can spend our entire lives achieving goals without ever having had a real purpose.
Because a desire is not necessarily a purpose.
And even when we finally get what we wanted, we may discover that it was never what we were truly looking for.
The Difference Between a Goal and a Purpose
Perhaps purpose is something deeper than a destination.
A goal says: I want to get there.
Purpose says: I want to move in this direction.
The difference is not trivial. A goal can be reached and immediately lose its meaning. A purpose, on the other hand, can accompany us throughout our lives without ever being reduced to a final achievement.
I believe there is something deeper than the goals we consciously set for ourselves: a kind of underlying matrix, a fundamental premise upon which we build our existence, often without even realizing it.
It is the direction we give our lives before we formulate specific goals. It is what guides our choices even when we cannot fully explain why we make them.
We can change jobs, cities, relationships, projects, and desires. We can even change our minds about what we once thought we wanted. Yet beneath all of this, there may remain a deeper direction.
The question, then, is not simply:
“What do I want to achieve?”
It is:
“What direction am I giving my life?”
What Thinkers Have Tried to Tell Us
It is a question human beings have been asking forever.
Viktor Frankl took it to its most extreme consequences. His experience in the Nazi concentration camps led him to reflect on the relationship between suffering, inner freedom, and meaning. His fundamental insight was that human beings do not live merely by seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. We need a meaning toward which we can orient ourselves.
That does not mean that having a purpose makes life easy.
It means something more radical: even in the midst of suffering, a person can have a reason to keep moving forward.
Albert Camus, too, began with one of the most uncomfortable questions of all: what does it mean to live in a universe that does not necessarily provide us with a ready-made meaning?
His reflection on the absurd does not simply lead to resignation. On the contrary, it places human beings before the responsibility of living even when the world does not necessarily hand us an answer.
Perhaps the meaning of life is not something we discover, already packaged and waiting for us.
Perhaps, at least in part, it is something we create through the direction we choose to give our existence.
These are precisely the kinds of ideas that have always interested me—not because they can give us a definitive formula, but because they prevent us from settling for the easiest answer.
You are alive because you are still alive.
But that is not an answer.
It is merely a fact.
The False Goals I Gave Myself
I can see this when I look back at my own life.
For years, I gave myself goals that I now recognize as false goals—or at least as goals that belonged more to the image I had constructed of myself than to who I actually was.
The first was to become some kind of new Paulo Coelho of world literature.
I imagined myself as a writer, a thinker, an author capable of reaching millions of people through books. It was an appealing image, but today I have to be honest with myself: I did not have the drive necessary for it, and more importantly, I did not have the genuine literary inspiration that allows a writer to devote an entire life to writing.
Perhaps I wanted the image of what I could become more than I wanted the work required to become it.
My own blog has helped me see that.
I write a great deal, but what I produce no longer feels like a literary vocation in the traditional sense. I no longer feel the need to become a great writer, publish the book that conquers the world, or turn myself into a figure in literature.
Literature simply doesn't attract me that much anymore.
And admitting that does not necessarily mean I failed.
Perhaps it means I finally stopped pursuing an image of myself that never truly belonged to me.
The Political Dream
The second false goal was completely different: politics.
For a while, I imagined that a political career could allow me to escape what I call the swamp of local government and take me somewhere else—perhaps all the way to Parliament.
I had the example of Luigi Di Maio in front of me: a young man from an ordinary background, catapulted from the anonymity of an apartment building in Pomigliano d'Arco to the seats of the Italian Parliament.
The idea was powerful: escape the narrow dimensions of everyday administrative life, skip several rungs of the ladder, and arrive where, at least apparently, the great decisions are made.
But today, looking at it with greater clarity, that goal feels less and less like mine.
Italian politics no longer excites me.
Part of the reason is that I find it difficult to regard Italy as fully sovereign in the way the word sovereignty might suggest. Italy is deeply embedded in the Western alliance system and in its relationship with the United States, and that makes it difficult for me to see national politics as the place where all of the country's fundamental choices can truly be decided.
But even here, the real issue is not whether my political interpretation is right or wrong.
The real issue is that I no longer want that career the way I once did.
The Paradox of Power
Of course, there is also a very practical side of politics that can be attractive: parliamentary salaries, benefits, privileges, and above all the possibility of building a financially comfortable life that is far removed from the circumstances of many ordinary citizens.
I once knew a former member of Parliament who seemed to regard his political career almost as an investment: five years in Parliament, followed by the opportunity to enjoy his pension benefits for the rest of his life.
From that perspective, it might seem like a remarkably convenient way to live.
But there is one thing that separates me profoundly from that idea.
I am not a parasite.
I don't say that to claim moral superiority. I say it because, to me, the real issue with politics is not simply how much a politician earns.
The real issue is what he or she can actually decide.
A politician who does not truly make decisions, who does not genuinely exercise the power entrusted to him, who simply occupies a position, collects a salary, and waits for the benefits to accumulate may be acting entirely within the rules.
But from my perspective, that person is still a parasite.
Because power without the ability—or the willingness—to change reality is nothing more than a rent.
When False Goals Fall Away
Perhaps this is what I am learning.
A goal can seem enormously important for years and then suddenly lose its appeal. Not because we have become incapable of achieving it, but because we finally realize that it was never really our goal.
Sometimes what we call failure is actually liberation.
I pursued the idea of becoming a famous writer. I imagined a political career that would take me far beyond the administrative world in which I found myself.
Today, both of those images have lost much of their power over me.
And perhaps that is a good thing.
Because when false goals fall away, there is finally room to search for the real one.
But that leaves me with a question I can no longer escape.
If I take politics away and take literature away, who am I?
So Who Am I?
That question puts me face-to-face with something much more difficult than choosing a career.
I can tell myself that my purpose is to provide for my family. And that is certainly a noble purpose. I can be a good husband, a good father, care for the people I love, work, pay my bills, and try to build a peaceful old age.
But something inside me tells me that this cannot be everything.
Because even that, if reduced to its purely material dimension, could become another form of survival.
I work to support my family. I support my family to protect the well-being of the people I love. I keep working so I can eventually retire. I retire so that I can finally have time to live.
And then what?
I do not want to spend my life waiting for the moment when life will finally begin.
Perhaps the real problem is that I have spent too much time looking for a destination.
A successful book. Parliament. A position. Recognition.
Perhaps I kept asking myself where I wanted to arrive, when I should have been asking what I want to leave behind along the way.
The Blog and the Desire Not to Speak Into a Void
My blog is helping me see something I could not see before.
It has not become what I once imagined. It has not turned its author into a famous writer. It has not created the large community of readers I may have unconsciously wanted.
And yet I keep writing.
Why?
Perhaps because writing allows me to do something very simple:
to keep someone company.
A friend. Someone I know. But also a stranger who happens to come across one of my articles.
And if that person finishes reading and feels a little less alone, discovers a question they had never put into words, or simply spends ten minutes in the company of a thought that does them some good, then perhaps what I have done was not pointless.
It is not literature in the way I once imagined it.
It is not politics.
It is not power.
It is presence.
And perhaps this also explains my long-standing, often frustrated desire to have people around me.
Maybe I do not simply want followers.
Maybe I want to reach someone.
Real People on the Other Side
Of course, I mean real people.
Not the numbers in the statistics. Not automated traffic coming from China, Singapore, or anywhere else in the world.
A bot can inflate a counter, but it cannot listen to me.
I am looking for the human being on the other side.
The person who actually reads. The person who may never leave a comment, never click “like,” never write to me, and simply return to his or her life.
I will never know who that person is.
But that person will know that, for a few minutes, somewhere, someone put into words a thought that perhaps belonged to them as well.
And then perhaps I am not simply surviving.
Perhaps I am creating a small space where two lives that will never meet can still come into contact.
Is that enough?
Maybe not.
But perhaps the problem is that we have learned to consider only what is large, visible, profitable, or recognized to be meaningful.
A person in Parliament seems to have a purpose.
A bestselling writer seems to have a purpose.
A successful entrepreneur seems to have a purpose.
But why should there be less value in someone who manages simply to leave a thought in another person's mind?
What I Wish for Others
Whatever I wish for other people, I have to wish for myself first.
I cannot tell others that they need to find a purpose while I am content merely to survive.
I cannot point toward a direction if I am unwilling to search for it in my own life.
That is why this reflection is not meant to be a lesson for anyone else.
It is, first and foremost, a question I am asking myself.
What is the underlying matrix of my existence?
What fundamental premise, consciously or unconsciously, is guiding my choices?
What direction remains when I strip away all the temporary goals, the passing desires, and all the little things that seem essential today but may mean nothing tomorrow?
Perhaps that is where true purpose begins.
I Haven't Found the Answer Yet
The truth is, I still do not know what my purpose is.
And perhaps that is the most honest thing I can write.
I do not want to invent one simply because I need to feel important.
I want to find something that is true.
Something that remains after all the false images I have built of myself have fallen away.
Perhaps my purpose will not be to become somebody.
Perhaps it will be to be somebody for someone.
Perhaps I do not need to build an audience. Perhaps I simply need to reach a real person every once in a while.
Perhaps I do not need to change the world.
Perhaps I need only to leave some trace of my passing through it.
And perhaps even keeping someone company—a friend, a lonely person, a stranger who opens an article on an ordinary evening—can be a form of purpose, if we do it not to fill the emptiness inside ourselves, but because we have something authentic to share.
I still do not know whether that will be enough for me.
But I know it is far more real than the false goals I pursued in the past.
Because in the end, the question is not simply:
“How long will I manage to stay alive?”
Nor is it:
“What will I manage to achieve?”
The question is much harder:
“What makes life worth living?”
Perhaps I will never find a definitive answer.
But as long as I keep searching for one—as long as I keep questioning, writing, thinking, and perhaps keeping someone company on the other side of a screen—then maybe, at least for now, I am doing more than simply surviving.
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