Somewhere along the way, purpose became a destination. A thing you find, like a parking spot or a lost phone. People go looking for their “why” the way they’d go looking for a missing sock, convinced it’s hiding somewhere just out of sight, in a career change or a retreat in the hills or a book with a title in bold sans-serif font.

I don’t think it works like that. I think the search itself is the mistake.

I run a brand consultancy. I catch snakes at 11PM for people who called in a panic. I do stand-up in a room that seats eighty, on a good night. I photograph birds I can’t always name until I get home and look them up. I build small apps nobody asked for, and I practise a card trick a few hundred times before anyone sees it. None of these things share an industry, a client base, or a skillset that transfers neatly from one to the other. On paper it looks like a man who couldn’t commit to a lane. In practice, it’s the most coherent thing about me, because the coherence was never supposed to be in the résumé. It’s in the attention.

Every single one of those pursuits demands the same thing from me: show up, notice what’s actually happening, and respond to it without flinching. A snake doesn’t care about your five-year plan. A joke that isn’t landing doesn’t care either. A kingfisher on a wire gives you maybe four seconds before it decides you’re not worth its time. You either learn to be present for these things or you miss them, permanently, because they don’t wait around for you to find your why first.

That’s the part I’d push back on in the “find your purpose” framing. It assumes purpose is a fixed object sitting somewhere in your future, waiting to be discovered like a buried artefact. But nothing about how I actually live supports that. My days aren’t building toward a why. They’re made of whys, dozens of small ones, stacked on top of each other. The rescue that went right. The set that got a laugh I didn’t expect. The frame where the light hit the bird’s eye just so. None of these are proof of a larger purpose I’m working towards. They are the purpose. Fully formed, fully spent, in the moment they happened.

I’ve noticed the people who chase the big why tend to discount everything that isn’t big. The mega holiday matters, the ordinary Tuesday doesn’t. The client win matters, the fifteen minutes spent getting a joke’s timing right doesn’t. I used to think that way too, mostly because it’s the story we’re handed. It’s the story we’d love to put up on our public profiles. Grand gestures, career milestones, the highlight reel. But the highlight reel isn’t a life, it’s an edit. And edits, by definition, cut out most of what actually happened.

What I’ve come to trust instead, is smaller and less photogenic. I return to the same communities for rescues, not because the snake is more interesting the fifth time, but because I like knowing the security guard’s name and which section of the complex has the loose drainpipe. There’s a place in Wayanad I’ve now been to twenty-four times. Not twenty-four different corners of it, the same forest, the same handful of trails, revisited until I stopped photographing it like a tourist and started noticing it like a neighbour. I do the same thing with a card trick, running it a few hundred times until the method disappears and only the moment is left. I do it with apps too, rebuilding the same small idea in a slightly different shape until one version finally feels right. None of this is nostalgia. It’s a bet that depth beats novelty, most of the time, for most people, including me.

None of this is an argument for staying small or refusing ambition. I still build things, still chase the harder rescue, still write the pitch I’m not sure will land. Ambition and attention aren’t opposites. But ambition without attention is just motion, and I’ve had enough motion in my life to know it doesn’t add up to much on its own.

So no, I don’t think you find your why. I think you’ve probably been living inside it for a while now, mostly unnoticed, because it never announced itself as anything more than an ordinary Tuesday, a bird you almost missed, a snake someone else was afraid of.