There is one perennial question every one of us, at some point, has quietly sat with. It took me a long time to arrive at my own answer. And even longer to realize the answer came with a second half. One that quietly contradicts the first.

There is something strange about being human.

Of all the species walking this planet, only one wakes up in the morning and asks itself why it is here at all. Only one builds telescopes to look at stars it will never touch, sends ships into oceans it cannot live in, points cameras at galaxies it cannot reach, and still feels a quiet ache when it finally puts the instruments down at night. A dog does not do this. A bird does not do this. They wake up, they live, they sleep. They are not haunted by the question.

We are.

And we are haunted by it because we were given an intellect, and the very nature of intellect is to dissect, to question, to keep peeling at the layers of things until it finds the thing underneath. That is the gift, and the curse, of being the only species with this much self awareness. The mind cannot rest until it knows why it is doing what it is doing. So somewhere, in everyone’s life, the question arrives uninvited.

What is the point of all this?

For some, it shows up at twenty, sitting on the floor of a college dorm. For some, it shows up at forty, in a hotel room after a long flight. For some, it shows up only at the very end, when there is no time left to do anything about it. But it shows up. It always does.

And here is the saddest part.

Most people never actually answer it. They never find their purpose. They circle it for years, sometimes for an entire life, and then quietly settle for whatever the world handed them as a substitute. Somewhere in their twenties or thirties, the wondering just stops. Not because they found anything. Because the rent is due. The kids need school. The parents are getting old. The bills do not pause while you sit on a couch trying to figure out the meaning of your life.

And so we slowly tell ourselves that this is what life is. That this is what every grown up does. That the questioning was meant for college kids and philosophers, not for someone with responsibilities.

But this is a borrowed answer.

And borrowed answers do not survive the moment they are tested. We are about to see what happens when work itself is taken away from a lot of people. A certain part of society is openly saying it now. That in the next few years, technology will do most of the jobs. AI will rid us of our mundane routine. So that, while, all of us, can finally follow our passions, our purpose, while sipping pina coladas on a beach somewhere. That you can build anything with AI. That all you need is agency, and AI will help you build your dream, your desired life.

But most people do not know what their passion is. Most people will never know what their purpose is.

Most people do not have the agency to think new ideas, to create new innovation, no matter how easy the tools that promise to help them do that. For most people, the purpose has quietly, by default, become the work itself. Wake up. Get to the office. 9 to 5. Come back. Feed the family. Sleep. Do it again on Monday. And that becomes a routine. That routine slowly starts to mirage as a Purpose. A meaning. And when that work is no longer there, what happens to a society that no longer finds the meaning to continue going?

I am aware of the counter arguments. That AI will end up creating more jobs than it takes, the way every wave of technology before it has. That Jevons paradox will play out again. This argument, more often than not, is made loudest by those in tech circles who stand to benefit the most, pecuniarily, from this technology being adopted at scale. They will compare AI to the steam engine. To electricity. To the printing press.

I do not fully buy that comparison. But that is a longer argument for another essay, and not really the point of this one.

Whether the full version of that AI prediction lands or not is a different conversation. The fact that the prospect of it scares so many people so deeply is itself the proof. If your work disappearing is enough to collapse the meaning of your life, then your work was never the purpose. It was the scaffolding you mistook for the building. And the day the scaffolding comes down, you find out, in the worst possible way, that there was nothing underneath.

This happens because for a long time we have been taught to attach the word purpose to a list of things that were never actually it. Some people say the purpose of life is money. Some say happiness. Some say success. Some say faith. Some say family. Some, the loudest ones, say it is your work. That what stays behind when you are gone is the legacy of what you built, and so building must be the point.

None of these are the purpose.

I have thought about this question for as long as I can remember, and the way I have come to my answer has been the long way around, through time and money first, before arriving at the actual thing.

Money is important because it buys time.

It frees up time for you. Time which you can then choose to spend chasing whatever you think your purpose is, however big or small that may be.

Because Time is the original currency of life. Rest everything is a derivative. However, Money is just the currency of time. The greatest inequality in life is not money, it is time.

Take Uber vs trains. Have multiple nannies and stay at home parents instead of both parents juggling between jobs, racing to work and coming back to take care of kids. Have your whole tuition paid by your parents rather than working side jobs, waiting tables at a restaurant or spending a few hours a week grading tests for a professor, and still getting into debt. Want to buy groceries, have someone deliver them to you at an extra fee, rather than driving out to the budget stores and picking things yourself.

Money makes society consider you credit worthy, gives you easy loans, higher capital to start that business or passion you dream of, rather than pushing harder, spending more days, weeks, months just to access that loan to finance your aspiration. And over the years, all these little differences in time that money creates start to add up. They build into something bigger. When some wealthy person says they can buy anything but they cannot buy time, they are just ignorant of how much time advantage they already had their entire life.

So money is important. But only because it gives you back time. And time is only worth something because of what you choose to do with it. Which eventually brings you to the actual question. What do you choose to do with that bought back time? What is the purpose of all this in the first place?

And for a long time, after lots of experiences, good and bad, happy and painful, I have realized that the Purpose of Life is People.

Every experience I have had in my life, every experience you have had in yours, the joy, the cries, the love you felt for someone, the heart ache you carried when someone walked away from you, the smile your kid brings to your face the moment they wake up, the joy of seeing your parents in good health, the slow melancholy of watching them grow old and starting to need your support, the same way you once needed theirs when you were growing up. All of it. Every single bit of it. It is because of People.

Take any joy you have ever felt in your life and trace it back honestly. The first laugh of a child you love. The smell of your mother’s kitchen on a Sunday. A friend who showed up at three in the morning when you did not even ask. The hand of someone you love resting on yours in a quiet room. The drive to the airport that you did not want to end. A goodbye that took everything in you to say. Every single one of these has a person in it. Not a thing. Not an object. Not an achievement on a wall. A person.

Now imagine the opposite. Take a suitcase of cash. Fly to Vegas. Win the biggest jackpot the casino has ever paid out. Stand alone in that hotel room with all of it spread out on the bed. No one to call. No one to share the news with. No one waiting on the other side. The high will last about ten minutes. After that, the room will get very quiet.

You can only buy so much food for yourself, so many cars for yourself, so many watches for yourself, before all of it begins to look meaningless sitting in a drawer. But the joy of buying a small gift for someone you love, of seeing their face light up at something small you remembered, of sitting across from them at a table you paid for, of taking your parents on a trip they could never have taken alone, that joy does not run out. It does not get used up. It compounds.

That is the test. If joy compounds when shared, and decays when alone, then the math of life is not complicated.

Every form of human emotion I have ever experienced, the deepest ones, the ones that mattered, never came from things. They came from people. The anger. The hurt. The smile that takes over your face for no reason when their name appears on your phone. The way you replay a single conversation in your head a hundred times. The pain when they leave. The melancholy when they are no longer around. The strange weight of seeing an empty chair where someone used to sit. None of this lives inside an object. It lives inside the people we walked some part of this life with.

So the answer should be simple. If People are the purpose, then chase them. Hold them. Show up for them. Break a few rules to keep them. Take the flight. Make the call. Send the message your ego is begging you not to send. Say the thing while you still can. Do not wait until the eulogy to say what could have been said over a cup of coffee.

That is what I believed for the longest time. And honestly, I still do.

But sitting with this idea long enough, I have arrived at a second realization that I did not see coming. One that takes the first idea and turns it on its head.

I know that sounds strange.

It took me a long time to even let that thought form in my head, let alone write it down. Because for most of my adult life, I was on the other side of this idea.

I was the one fighting fate. The one trying to bargain with circumstances. The one who genuinely believed that if I cared hard enough, showed up consistently enough, loved honestly enough, the world would somehow feel too guilty to take the person away.

Somewhere along the way, I had quietly confused love with permanence. I had decided that if someone meaningful walked into my life, the entire point was for them to stay. And if they did not, then someone had failed. Either I had not done enough, or they had not done enough. There was always a verdict waiting to be issued at the end of every relationship that did not last.

But the older I get, the more I am starting to see this differently.

That people, in their deepest form, are experiences. And experiences were never built to stay. They were built to arrive, to give what they came to give, and then to keep moving.

There are people who are with you for a long, long stretch of life.

A parent who has watched you grow from a child into whoever you are now. A sibling who knew you before the world started shaping you. The friend from school or college who has seen every version of you, the good ones, the embarrassing ones, the lost ones, the steady ones. A co-founder or a colleague you built something real with, who knows your work brain almost as well as you do. A partner who walked through years of decisions, joys and quiet defeats with you.

These are the people who sit through the different versions of you that come and go across the years. The one at twenty who did not know himself. The one at thirty who thought he did. The one slowly forming now. They earn the long arc of you, simply by being there. They are the rare ones.

And then there are people who arrive for a much shorter while.

A colleague you worked closely with for a few intense years, before one of you moved cities or moved on. A friend who showed up at a very specific phase of your life, walked through it with you, and then quietly drifted as both your lives kept turning. A business partner who taught you everything you needed to know before the partnership ran its course. A mentor who shaped a few years of your thinking and then stepped back. A stranger in another country. Someone you almost loved. A person who shared a single afternoon with you in a city that was not supposed to mean anything at all.

They were never meant to be permanent.

They came in to deliver something specific. A lesson. A softening. A question. A part of you that you had not yet met. A small piece of clarity about what you actually wanted, or about what you had been quietly settling for.

And once that delivery was complete, they left. Sometimes loudly. Sometimes so quietly that you only noticed they were gone months later, when you reached for them in your head and realized they were no longer there.

And the leaving is not always dramatic. Or painful. Or personal. Sometimes their role in your life was simply complete. Sometimes the two of you outgrew each other without anyone doing anything wrong. Sometimes you were on different timelines of growth. Sometimes the lesson the two of you came to teach each other had already been learned.

Sometimes that is just how life moves.

For a long time, I fought this.

So I would stay. I would explain. I would write the message and delete the message and write it again. I would book the flight. And when I did not, I would carry that regret for a long time, quietly wishing I had booked the flight. I would knock on the door. I would do whatever I could think of to keep the chapter open.

Because the math in my head was simple. If People were the Purpose, then holding on to them had to be the Goal.

But here is the part nobody really wants to say out loud.

You don’t own anyone in life.

Not their time.

Not their attention.

Not their love.

Not even their staying.

Once you really let that idea settle inside you, something quietly loosens. The grip softens. The bargaining stops. You stop treating every connection like it has to become a forever in order for it to have meant something.

Some people are travelers walking alongside you on your road for a while. Not landmarks meant to stand there forever. They were always going to keep moving. And a fork in the road is not the same thing as a road failing. Nobody calls a path branching off a tragedy. Nobody calls two travelers heading in different directions a betrayal. We just call it the shape of how journeys move.

People are no different. The mistake is not that their road turns away from yours. The mistake is when you try to plant a traveler in the ground like a landmark, holding on to a brief, beautiful walk as if it was supposed to be the entire map.

This is where a very different kind of letting go starts to form inside you. Not the cold kind. Not the version that pretends not to care anymore. The opposite, actually. The grown up kind. The one that lets you love someone without trying to script the next ten years of their life for them.

You stop writing endings in your head. You stop bracing yourself for the day they walk. You learn to actually be there with people while they are still here, instead of spending the whole time guarding yourself against the eventual goodbye. You learn to meet them where they actually are. Not where you wished they were.

Not where some calendar in your head said they should have been by now.

You laugh with them. You grow with them. You learn from them. And you trust that even if their road eventually turns away from yours, none of it will have been wasted. The walk simply ended where it was always going to end. That is not a failure. And there is nothing in it that anyone needs to apologize for.

Once you understand this, a quiet weight comes off your chest. You stop expecting people to complete you. You stop handing them the responsibility for your wholeness, which was never theirs to carry to begin with. You let them just be who they are. And in return, you finally let yourself be whole. Whether they stay. Or whether they walk.

And yet, when someone you love deeply leaves your life, whether by walking away from you, or by passing away from this world, your heart will still hurt.

Not for an afternoon.

For days.

For weeks.

Sometimes for months.

That is okay. That is the process you have to walk through. The peace only comes at the end of it. In the quiet understanding that this was always how Nature meant it to be. That letting go of people was always the goal.

There is another reason letting go is the goal, and this one is harder to face. Because Nature has been quietly telling us this from the beginning of time, and most of us have not been listening.

If you do not learn to let go of people on your own, life will eventually do it for you.

The friend who slowly drifts. The parent who grows old. The partner who walks out. The child who builds their own life and no longer needs you the way they once did. And finally, the most undeniable teacher of them all, death itself.

Not because life is cruel. But because impermanence is not a flaw in the design of life. It is the design.

Every single person you have ever loved, you will one day either lose, or be lost by. There is no version of this story where everyone stays. There is only the version where you spent the time well, or you did not. Where you said the thing, or you did not. Where you carried them with grace when their chapter in your story ended, or where you carried them as a wound for the rest of your years.

And so the contradiction stops being a contradiction. People are the purpose, because they are the only thing that gives this strange, intellect cursed, star gazing life any real warmth. And letting them go is the goal, because gripping them too tightly is the surest way to lose the very thing you were trying to keep.

Love is not the opposite of letting go. They are the same gesture, performed at different points in the same story.

The whole game, then, is to love people fully while they are here, and to release them gently when their time in your life is done. Not to chase. Not to cling. Not to drag a chapter past the moment it has finished writing itself. To say what needed to be said. To show up while they were still in the room. To let your goodbyes be heavy with everything that was real between you, but not heavier than they need to be.

If I had to compress everything I have come to believe into a single sentence I could leave behind, it would be this. The purpose of life is to spend your time, your free time, the time that is truly yours, on people. And the goal of life is to learn how to let those very people go, when life asks you to, without bitterness, without grasping, and without losing the love you had for them in the first place.

You will love people. You will lose people. Sometimes you will be the one walking away. Sometimes you will be the one watching them walk. Both are part of the same life. Both are part of being human. The only thing you really get to choose is how you carry the loving and the losing inside you when the day is done.

Walk through your life with open hands. Hold people gently. Love them honestly. Let them go when they have given everything they came to give, and let yourself go when you have given everything you came to give.

Because in the end, the Purpose of Life is People.
And Letting Them Go is the Goal.

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