There is one question every one of us has sat with at some point. It took me a long time to arrive at my own answer, and even longer to realize that the answer came with a second half that 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 humans build telescopes to look at stars they will never touch, and only humans point cameras at galaxies they cannot reach. And when we finally put the instruments down at night, we still feel a quiet ache. A dog does not ask the question, and a bird does not ask it either. They wake up, they live, and they sleep.

We are the ones haunted by it.

We are haunted by it because we were given an intellect, and the nature of intellect is to question everything until it finds what lies underneath. Self awareness is both the gift and the curse of our species. The mind cannot rest until it knows why it is doing what it is doing, so somewhere in every life the question arrives uninvited.

What is the point of all this?

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

The saddest part is that most people never actually answer it. They never find their purpose. They circle the question 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 stops, not because they found anything, but because the rent is due and the kids need school. No one can pause the bills while they sit on a couch and work out the meaning of their life.

So we slowly tell ourselves that adult life is simply like that, and that the questioning was meant for college kids and philosophers rather than for people with responsibilities. But that answer is borrowed.

A borrowed answer does not survive the moment it is tested, and we are about to see what happens when work itself is taken away from a lot of people. Many people in technology now say openly that within a few years AI will do most of the jobs, and that all of us will finally be free to follow our passions. They say you can build anything with AI, and that all you need is the agency to do it.

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 of new ideas, no matter how easy the tools become. For most people, the work itself has quietly become the purpose. They wake up and go to the office. They come home, feed the family, and sleep, and they do it again on Monday. The routine slowly starts to look like a purpose. When the work is no longer there, what happens to a society that can no longer find a reason to keep going?

I am aware of the counter argument that AI will create more jobs than it takes, the way every earlier wave of technology has. People who make that argument often point to the Jevons paradox, which says that when something gets cheaper, we end up using more of it. The argument is made loudest by people in technology who stand to earn the most from AI being adopted at scale, and they compare AI to the steam engine, to electricity, and 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 prediction comes true is a separate question. The fear itself proves the point, because if losing your work is enough to collapse the meaning of your life, then the work was never your purpose. The work only stood in the place where a purpose should have been, and when the work goes, you find out that nothing else was there.

We reach for work as a purpose because we have long been taught to attach the word purpose to things that were never it. Some people say the purpose of life is money, some say happiness or success, and some say faith or family. The loudest ones say it is your work, because what stays behind when you are gone is what you built. None of these is the purpose.

I have thought about the question for as long as I can remember, and I came to my answer the long way around, through money and time first.

Money is important because it buys time.

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

Time is the basic currency of life, and everything else derives from it. Money is only a claim on time. The greatest inequality in life is not in money but in time.

A wealthy student whose parents pay the tuition can spend evenings studying, while a poorer student waits tables and still ends up in debt. Money buys the same kind of extra hours everywhere, e.g., in rides instead of trains, in nannies instead of two parents racing between jobs, and in groceries delivered instead of a drive to the budget store.

Money also makes lenders trust you, so you get the loan for your business quickly, while a poorer person spends months chasing the same loan. Over the years the small differences in time add up into something much bigger. When a wealthy person says they can buy anything except time, they are ignoring how much extra time their money has already bought them their entire life.

So money is important only because it gives you back time, and time is only worth something because of what you choose to do with it. The real question is what you choose to spend that time on.

After many experiences, good and bad, happy and painful, I have come to believe that the purpose of life is people.

Every meaningful experience I have had, and every one you have had, comes back to people. The love you felt for someone, and the heartache you carried when they walked away, came from people. The smile your kid brings to your face the moment they wake up, and the slow sadness of watching your parents grow old and begin to need your support, come from people too.

Take any joy you have ever felt and trace it back honestly. Think of the first laugh of a child you love, or of the friend who showed up at three in the morning when you did not even ask. Every joy like that has a person in it, not a thing, and not an achievement on a wall.

Now imagine the opposite. You fly to Vegas with a suitcase of cash, you win the biggest jackpot the casino has ever paid out, and then you stand alone in your hotel room with the money spread out on the bed. There is no one to call and no one to share the news with. The high will last about ten minutes, and after that the room will get very quiet.

You can only buy so much food, so many cars, and so many watches for yourself before all of it starts to look meaningless in a drawer. But the joy of buying a small gift for someone you love, or of taking your parents on a trip they could never have taken alone, does not run out. It grows every time you share it.

The test is simple. If joy grows when it is shared and fades when you are alone, then the answer is not complicated.

Every deep emotion I have ever felt came from people, not from things. The anger and the hurt came from people. So did the smile that takes over your face when their name appears on your phone, and the pain when they leave, and the strange weight of seeing an empty chair where someone used to sit. None of it 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 and hold them. Show up for them, and break a few rules to keep them. Take the flight and make the call. Send the message your ego is begging you not to send, and 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.

I believed all of that for the longest time, and honestly, I still do.

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

I know that sounds strange.

It took me a long time to let the thought form in my head, let alone write it down, because for most of my adult life I stood on the other side of it.

I fought fate, and I tried to bargain with circumstances. I genuinely believed that if I cared hard enough and 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 that if they did not, then someone had failed. Either I had not done enough, or they had not. At the end of every relationship that did not last, there was always a verdict waiting to be issued.

But the older I get, the more I see it differently.

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

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

A parent watches you grow from a child into whoever you are now, and a sibling knew you before the world started shaping you. The friend from school or college has seen every version of you, the good ones and the lost ones. A partner walks through years of decisions, joys, and quiet defeats with you.

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

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

Some are colleagues or mentors who shaped a few intense years of your life before one of you moved on. Some are friends who belonged to one specific phase of your life and quietly drifted when it ended. And some are people you almost loved, 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, such as a lesson, a question, a part of you that you had not yet met, or a small piece of clarity about what you actually wanted.

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

The leaving is not always dramatic, painful, or personal. Sometimes their role in your life was simply complete, and sometimes the two of you outgrew each other without anyone doing anything wrong. Sometimes life simply moves that way.

For a long time, I fought that truth.

I would stay, and I would explain. I would write the message and delete it, and then I would write it again. I would book the flight, and when I did not, I carried the regret for a long time. I did whatever I could think of to keep the chapter open.

The logic in my head was simple. If people were the purpose, then holding on to them had to be the goal.

But nobody wants to say the next part out loud.

You don’t own anyone in life.

You do not own their time, their attention, their love, or even their staying.

Once you let that idea settle inside you, something loosens. The bargaining stops, and you stop treating every connection as if it has to become permanent in order to have meant something.

Some people walk beside you for a stretch of your life, and they were always going to keep moving. When their life turns in a different direction from yours, nothing has failed and no one has betrayed anyone. The mistake is not that they moved on. The mistake is to demand that a person who came into your life for a short while stay for the whole of it.

At that point a different kind of letting go starts to form inside you. It does not mean pretending not to care anymore. It means loving someone without trying to script the next ten years of their life for them.

You stop writing endings in your head, and you stop bracing for the day they walk. You learn to be 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, and not where some calendar in your head said they should have been by now.

You laugh with them and grow with them. You learn from them. And you trust that even if their life eventually turns away from yours, none of it will have been wasted. The time together ended where it was always going to end, and no one needs to apologize for that.

Once you understand that people leave, a quiet weight comes off your chest. You stop expecting people to complete you, and you stop handing them the responsibility for your wholeness, which was never theirs to carry. You let them 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. It will hurt for days, for weeks, and sometimes for months.

That hurt is okay, and it is the process you have to walk through. The peace comes only at the end of it, in the quiet understanding that nature always meant it to be this way, and that letting go of people was always the goal.

There is another reason letting go is the goal, and it is harder to face. Nature has been telling us 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.

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

Life does that not because it is cruel, but because impermanence is not a flaw in the design of life. Impermanence is the design.

You will one day either lose, or be lost by, every single person you have ever loved. There is no version of the story where everyone stays. There is only the version where you spent the time well and said what needed to be said, or the version where you did not, and carried the loss as a wound for the rest of your years.

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

Loving someone and letting them go are not opposites. They are the same act of love, carried out at different points of the same story.

The whole task, then, is to love people fully while they are here, and to release them gently when their time in your life is done. Do not chase, and do not cling. Say what needed to be said, and show up while they were still in the room. Let your goodbyes carry everything that was real between you, but nothing more than that.

If I had to compress everything I have come to believe into a single thought I could leave behind, it would be the following. The purpose of life is to spend your 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, and you will lose people. Sometimes you will be the one walking away, and sometimes you will be the one watching them walk. Both are part of being human, and 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, and 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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