The Seven Levels of Purpose (Or: How I Stopped Panic-Googling “What Am I Supposed to Be Doing With My Life”)

There are days when I wake up absolutely certain of my purpose. And then there are days when I stand in the kitchen holding a cup of coffee, staring into the middle distance, thinking, Surely this is not the full arc of my heroic journey.

If you’ve ever had that feeling, congratulations: you are a card-carrying human.

We talk about “finding your purpose” as if it’s a lost set of keys. Check the couch cushions. Check the junk drawer. Check under capitalism. But purpose isn’t one thing you trip over and then keep forever like a winning lottery ticket. It’s more like a series of rooms you walk through in life. Sometimes you redecorate. Sometimes you set one on fire and move on.

Here’s a framework I love: the seven levels of purpose. Think of them as stages, not grades. You don’t “fail” one and get sent back to Purpose Kindergarten. You just… grow.

Level 1: Survival Mode

This is the “I am just trying to get through the day without screaming at a stranger” level. Purpose here is paying rent, keeping the lights on, and not eating cereal for dinner three nights in a row. There is no shame in this level. Whole systems are designed to keep people stuck here. If your purpose right now is stability, that is a noble, revolutionary act in a world that profits from your exhaustion.

Level 2: The Gold Star Level

Here, purpose is about approval. Titles. Likes. Applause. Being the Good Girl. The Good Worker. The “Look, Mom, I’m Very Impressive” human. Society loves this level because it’s productive and obedient. The only problem? You can climb very high here and still feel weirdly empty, like you won a game you didn’t actually want to play.

Level 3: The “Who Am I, Really?” Level

This is the mildly uncomfortable awakening stage. You start asking dangerous questions like: Do I even like this life I built? You begin noticing where your choices came from fear, or conditioning, or other people’s expectations. This is where a lot of us start journaling. Or going to therapy. Or both. Or staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m. thinking, Huh.

Level 4: The Service Level

Now purpose starts to turn outward. You want your life to matter to someone besides your résumé. You care about impact. You volunteer. You mentor. You speak up. You start to notice injustice and think, “Well, that’s not acceptable,” and then make the terrible mistake of actually doing something about it.

Welcome, my fellow troublemakers.

Level 5: The Calling Level

This is where purpose stops feeling like a strategy and starts feeling like a pull. You don’t always know where it’s going, but you know when you’re not following it. This is the “I can’t not do this” stage. Also known as: wildly inconvenient for polite society.

Level 6: The Embodiment Level

At this level, purpose isn’t something you talk about. It’s how you live. It shows up in your boundaries. Your spending. Your relationships. Your courage. You don’t just believe certain things — you organize your life around them. This is where values stop being decorative.

Level 7: The Legacy Level

This is the big-picture stage. You’re thinking beyond yourself. Beyond your lifetime. You care about what you leave behind — not just money or stuff, but impact, ripples, changed minds, strengthened communities. This is the level of planting trees whose shade you’ll never sit under. Which is, frankly, the most radical thing you can do in a short-term-profit world.

Now, here’s the part I love: we move between these levels throughout our lives. Stress can knock you back into survival mode. Big change can fling you into soul-searching. A good cause can wake up your service instinct like a fire alarm.

You’re not behind. You’re not broken. You’re just human in a very weird historical moment.

And let’s be honest: the world right now is doing everything it can to keep us exhausted, distracted, and arguing with each other over crumbs while someone else walks off with the bakery. Choosing purpose — especially service, embodiment, and legacy — is not just personal development. It’s political. It’s resistance. It’s saying: I will not live a small, frightened, rented life.

So if your purpose today is simply to rest, to regroup, to survive — that counts. If your purpose is to speak up, to organize, to create, to care, to build something better — that counts too.

The only real tragedy is never asking the question at all.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to pursue my highest calling for the afternoon: making another cup of coffee and plotting the gentle overthrow of despair.

Stay mindful. Stay a little rebellious. And remember: history is written by people who decided their life was about more than just getting through it.

Julie Bolejack, MBA

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