A Letter To The Editor

This is a letter I wrote to Angela Pacienza, an Executive Editor at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s National Newspaper.

It is in response to a newsletter I received on Wednesday, January 28th, 2025

My headline to her read: We Have To Change The Way We Talk About Purpose.

I was excited to read about your new “How We Live” endeavour and even more excited to read purpose was tacked onto the end of the list of topics you will be covering.

As it reads, your new area of coverage will focus on “real people and the issues that hit closest to home: health, parenting, caregiving, friendship, community ties and finding purpose.”

I would like to make a suggestion, though. If you truly believe lost purpose is an issue affecting people today, we need to start writing about it based on what purpose really is.

Purpose is not something we have to find; it is not something we have to go outside of ourselves and look for.

Purpose is something we identify; it is something internal we single out about ourselves that we naturally do for others.

I am aware that this is what you might have meant, but to someone who spent most of her adult life doing what the self-help books and media suggested, to “find my purpose” and always came up empty-handed after looking for it in something outside of myself, words are important. 

A word of encouragement for your readers: identifying something that already exists inside of you is a lot easier than going outside and looking for it.