Consider the following comments on purpose.
We tell the young to find their purpose, then build an economy that needs them interchangeable.
A culture that ties purpose to paid work leaves the unemployed and the elderly with nowhere to stand.
The search for a single calling is a luxury of those who can afford to refuse most jobs.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Purpose given by others is obedience, purpose chosen alone is often just disguised vanity.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that the modern insistence on having a purpose is both a genuine human need and a demand that society makes far easier to preach than to satisfy. Begin by granting the truth in it, that people deprived of any sense of contribution tend to drift, despair or harden. Then press the contradiction: we celebrate the idea of a personal calling while organising work to be replaceable and insecure, so the same culture that demands purpose withholds the conditions for it. A useful third move questions whether purpose must be grand or singular at all, since meaning is often found in small obligations to particular people rather than in a destiny. Caution: avoid the comfortable sermon that anyone can simply choose their purpose, which ignores how circumstance, class and luck decide who gets to look for one.