I was 24, sitting in a call center in Romania, headset on, answering calls from people who needed help with things I didn’t care about.
I had a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Years of studying the human mind. I thought that would mean something in the job market. It didn’t. A guy who interviewed me for a marketing position basically told me my degree was worthless. His exact words were rougher than that, but the message landed.
So there I was, working alongside people who had barely finished high school, doing the same job, earning the same money, wondering what the hell all those years of study were for. I wasn’t angry at the people around me. I was angry at myself. Because I knew I was capable of more, and I had no idea how to prove it.
That was the beginning of the longest and most important search of my life. The search for my life, my purpose, and the realization that nobody was going to hand it to me.
The wrong paths taught me what I needed to know
After months of suffering through the call center, I quit. I figured if a psychology degree couldn’t get me a decent job in Romania, maybe I could find work online. Freelancing. Digital marketing. Something.
So I applied to over 200 jobs. I tried freelancer platforms. I pitched myself directly to business owners. I took online courses. I studied SEO, paid ads, social media marketing. I thought if I could just learn the right skill, the doors would open.
They didn’t.
I couldn’t sign a single client. I lacked the skills, yes. But more than that, I lacked alignment. The work I was chasing had nothing to do with who I actually was. I was optimizing for money, and my psyche could tell the difference.
Research supports this. Viktor Frankl observed in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) that meaning cannot be pursued directly. It has to emerge as a byproduct of dedicating yourself to something that matters. Chasing success for its own sake produces what he called the existential vacuum, a hollowness that no amount of achievement can fill (Crumbaugh & Maholick, 1964). I was living inside that vacuum and didn’t have the language for it yet.
What I did have was a growing awareness that I was on the wrong path. I wrote about that feeling of misalignment in why you ended up hating your life. The discomfort wasn’t a malfunction. It was data.
The thing that kept calling me back
During all of this, while I was failing at marketing and wondering if I’d ever escape the call center cycle, I was writing.
I started a Medium account. Wrote about psychology. Nobody read it at first. Sixty articles in, I still hadn’t made any money from it. By most metrics, this was another failure.
But something was different about this failure. I didn’t want to stop.
When I sat down to write about the human mind, how people grow, what makes them tick, something clicked. I could go for hours. I forgot to eat. I lost track of time. The work felt like play.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) called this state flow, complete absorption in an activity where the challenge matches your skills and the sense of time dissolves. Flow is one of the most reliable indicators that you’re doing something your psychology is built for. And I was drowning in it every time I wrote about the things I’d spent a decade studying.
That was the signal. Writing about psychology was the intersection of what I cared about, what I was trained in, and what I could offer the world. The purpose was right there, hiding in the thing I kept doing even when nobody was paying me to do it.
Upwork and the first domino
Eventually, after failing on every other platform, I joined Upwork. I expected nothing. I was disillusioned by months of rejection.
Within one week, I got my first client.
It was like a domino falling. That first job led to another, then another. Gradually, I built a reputation. I earned the Top Rated Plus badge, which on a global platform with millions of freelancers is genuinely difficult to achieve. I was competing with people from every corner of the world, many of whom charged far less than me.
But I could write about psychology with a depth that came from years of genuine study and personal obsession. That depth was my competitive edge. It wasn’t a certification or a technique. It was the accumulated weight of all those years I’d thought were wasted.
Looking back, every failure played a role. The call center taught me what misalignment feels like. The failed marketing attempts taught me that I couldn’t fake passion. The sixty unpaid articles on Medium became my portfolio. Nothing was wasted. It just didn’t make sense until later.
Purpose shows itself in retrospect
Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I was sitting in that call center: you don’t find your purpose by thinking about it. You find it by moving through enough wrong things to recognize the right one when it shows up.
William Damon (2008), director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, found that only about one in five young people have a fully developed sense of purpose. Most are either drifting, dabbling, or following a script someone else wrote for them. The path to purpose, Damon found, involves a combination of introspection, hands-on experience, and connection with something larger than yourself.
That matches my experience exactly. I didn’t sit in a room and meditate my way to purpose. I tried things. I failed at most of them. And the one that kept pulling me back, the one I couldn’t quit even when it wasn’t working, turned out to be the answer.
If you’re in that searching phase right now, the most useful thing I can offer is this: pay attention to what you keep returning to. The thing that won’t leave you alone, even when you try to be practical, even when the money isn’t there, even when it seems unreasonable. That persistence is meaningful.
My life, my purpose, right now
Today, I write about psychology for a living. I run stumbletowardthelight.com. I’ve built a freelance career that lets me live on my own terms, in a field I would study for free.
And still, life isn’t effortless. There are hard weeks. There are moments of doubt. The difference is that the difficulty is connected to something I believe in, so it has weight. It means something. That transforms the entire experience.
A meta-analysis by Cohen, Bavishi, and Rozanski (2016) found that a strong sense of purpose in life was associated with a 17% reduced risk of all-cause mortality. Purpose doesn’t just feel good. It keeps people alive. And when I read findings like that, I understand why those years of lostness felt so painful. My body and mind were trying to tell me that something essential was missing.
My life, my purpose, those two things are the same sentence now. They weren’t always. For years, my life was going in one direction and my purpose was buried underneath it, muffled by survival mode and inherited expectations.
If you feel that kind of split right now, between the life you’re living and the life you sense you’re meant for, take it seriously. That tension carries information. It’s pointing somewhere.
I’ve put together 15 questions to discover your life purpose that can help you start mapping where it’s pointing. And if you’re wondering what comes after you find it, that’s why you need a quest, because purpose without a direction forward becomes just another nice idea you never act on.
The thread was always there
I want to close with something honest.
I didn’t figure my life out in a flash of insight. There was no single moment where the clouds parted and the universe handed me a business plan. It was slow, confusing, and frequently demoralizing.
But when I look back now, I can see the thread. Psychology was always the thread. From the moment I started studying it as a teenager, it was the thing I returned to, over and over, through every detour and dead end.
Your thread is there too. Maybe you can already see it. Maybe it’s still tangled up in obligations and expectations and fear. Either way, it’s there. And the only way to follow it is to start pulling.
Even if you don’t know where it leads.
Even if everyone around you thinks you’re crazy.
Even if the worst case scenario is less terrifying than you imagine.
Pull the thread. Your life and your purpose are waiting to become the same thing.
References
Cohen, R., Bavishi, C., & Rozanski, A. (2016). Purpose in life and its relationship to all-cause mortality and cardiovascular events: A meta-analysis. Psychosomatic Medicine, 78(2), 122–133.
Crumbaugh, J. C., & Maholick, L. T. (1964). An experimental study in existentialism: The psychometric approach to Frankl’s concept of noogenic neurosis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 20(2), 200–207.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row.
Damon, W. (2008). The path to purpose: How young people find their calling in life. Free Press.
Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press.