Are you your own god?

What it means to be your own purposer - The Map, p2

Click “▶️” above to hear me read the letter to you.

I don’t think I’ve ever asked someone straight up whether they were their own god. I have asked people whether they were willing to be their own god, but it typically confuses people. The question needs some context.

First, why even ask it at all? What does God have to do with me?

Second, does the answer matter? What does it mean to be my own god?

The answer to both these questions is the same: If we serve someone’s purpose, they deserve to be called our god.

Why? Because when we serve someone’s purpose, we reject every contradictory purpose to serve theirs. Their purpose becomes our highest purpose.

Sometimes it seems like we serve someone else’s purpose, like parents or our boss at work. Other times, if we’re honest, we serve our own purpose and get what we want from other people even if it means we have to give them what they want.

We might not even realize who we serve. But we are always serving someone.

And that someone deserves to be called our god—at least where we serve their purpose.

Are we serving ourselves? Should we be?

The belief that choosing your own purpose makes you your own god is the second part of the map to meaning.

The last letter started us off with the unavoidability of faith, and we will conclude the map with the third step, that eternity matters, in the next letter.

Purpose determines the value of someone’s life. It determines their aim and their meaning.

A life without purpose would be a life that has no value.

I hope that feels intrinsically wrong to you. I know it wouldn’t have felt wrong to me when I was depressed. It just would have been a crushing accusation.

Most of us become numb to a meaningless life over time. I hope, whether you feel numb or you’ve never wondered about your life’s meaning at all, you’ll take another look when you see that it is possible to have meaning and that having meaning matters.

I want to show you the way out of the deep, dark well of depression by showing you two things:

1. The weight that is crushing you.

2. The light that removes the weight.

The light is what I am writing a map to find. I have previously called this light “God” with a capital G because this God is the reason why anything exists at all. I am calling this God “light” because, if there is a way to avoid being crushed by your purposer, then it depends on this first God.

The weight is simple to describe: You are being crushed because the god you serve cannot give your life meaning.

For me, that looked like procrastinating until results were necessary. It looked like getting angry at anyone who interrupted me. And mostly, it looked like trying to numb or distract myself from my feelings.

If you haven’t been depressed you still need to answer the question: Whose purpose do you serve? Because that purposer is your god.

To put it another way, if someone gives you a purpose, they have authority over your life. If you reject other purposes to serve that person’s purpose, then giving them that authority makes them your god.

And if you are the one judging whether a purpose is worthy of following or not, then you are your own purposer, and you are your own god.

If you’re trying to be the most notable person in your field, why? If it’s to satisfy your own pride, then you are your own god. If it’s to quiet the nagging from your parents, then they are your god.

If you’re trying to accumulate money, houses, cars, friends, popularity, etc., why? If it’s to feel like your life has meaning, then you are your own god.

While it is simple to claim that the crushing weight that causes depression is from the god you serve, it is much more difficult to experience it and identify it. And, perhaps it is even more difficult to convince yourself to look for a new god even when you are choked by despair.

There are three types of gods I have served under that crushed me:

1. None

2. Others

3. Myself

Nothing as god

I said earlier that you are always serving someone. Rather than serving no one, what I mean by “None” as a god is being unintentional about who you are serving.

There’s a principle from physics: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Free-roaming particles, like air, will naturally fill in empty spaces. That’s why you can breathe in all parts of your house.

This applies to particles because they can’t stop moving. This also applies to purpose because a person will always act. Even the decision not to act is an action.

And where there is an action, there is a purpose for that action, and where there is a purpose, there is a purposer.

So you can’t really serve no one—but you can be unintentional about who you are serving, leaving it up to the whim of the moment.

I believe I was genuinely left with a “purpose vacuum” in my teenage years. Why? Because they sucked.

Jokes aside, I chose my university major aimlessly. I chose to study mathematical physics so I could write better science fiction, which could be called unwise from my career’s perspective as it has not yet brought me a single dollar.

OK, that’s not the best example. It’s hard to describe a vacuum because there’s nothing in it to describe. Aimlessness is a good description, but a better description is the boundaries of the vacuum.

What creates the vacuum of having “no” god?

One of the things that led me to enroll aimlessly in a university when I was several years older than my first-year peers was my parents stepping back from directing my education.

I was in grade 10 or 11 when my parents got fed up with fighting me to teach me. I have written previously about how I am not a good student because I need to take things apart to understand them, and neither of my parents are teachers by nature. We butted heads over school and other things.

I’d never grown up with an expectation put on me to pursue any specific career or schooling. Adult life was just one big blank to me. Rather than being freeing, the vacuum was crushing, because I had no purpose to fill it with and was left to find my own.

Because I was left to my own devices and had no purpose in school, I only looked at my books enough to be left alone. Years later, I did distance courses to get into university out of, I think, desperation to find a new path for my life.

This is only one example. The absence of purpose did not give my life meaning and left me to be depressed in isolation.

Others as god

The purposes I was given by others weren’t any better.

I did not want to listen to others. I did not want them to give my life meaning or purpose. It inevitably seemed like they had no care for my life or their effect on it.

Often, it seemed like I served other people’s purposes unintentionally. Other times, I served their purposes because it was natural, like how parents give children their first idea of purpose.

In both cases, it was almost always the other person’s authority over me that allowed them to give me a purpose.

One way I served someone’s purpose unintentionally was being told who I was by an authority.

I wrote last time in part one of the map about how I was told by my church leaders that I was the kind of person who could hurt someone. I never went out looking to hurt people. But I believe I grew callous towards, and distant from, people after that.

They told me that my purpose in life was limited to hurting others.

What those leaders told me about myself stuck even though I had every reason to reject them.

What they told me stuck even when I did reject them.

Self as god

I rejected those authority figures because they had no care for my life, and one by one I rejected every authority figure in my life. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I chose was to be my own god by choosing my own purpose.

I figured I couldn’t do a worse job of running my life than someone running it with their eyes closed. Famous last words, right?

Even as my own god, I found that I still needed other people but now I was the one using them.

Remember: you can’t serve two gods. Either I am serving my purpose, or I am serving someone else’s. Because I was satisfying myself by giving others what they needed I wasn’t really serving them.

I treated other people as a means to an end.

This was most easily seen in how I moved through romantic relationships. I had a few. I was even engaged at one point, but she broke it off because she couldn’t see how we could survive with the distrust that came from using each other.

I wanted the satisfaction that came from loving someone. But I could only reach the satisfaction that came from using someone. That isn’t love.

The god I was serving was me, so I could only love myself.

What gods allow love?

Love is what convinced me there was more to life than suffering as my own god. And love is exactly what I couldn’t have when I was my own god.

Even the best romantic relationship isn’t love when you are your own god.

They aren’t love for one simple reason: Because a romantic relationship is another kind of service to someone. You can’t just mutually serve each other’s purposes. You either serve yourself, serve them, or serve something bigger.

Why can’t you both serve each other’s purposes? Because you are not the same person. The only way to serve each other’s purposes is to have the same purpose, which would mean becoming the same person.

The only way to become the same person is to have a shared ideal. And that shared ideal should then be called god.

And unless the shared ideal is its own puposer, an active god not a passive one, it’s just a mask for trying to compromise with someone else’s purpose.

The alternative to becoming one person is “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” until it stops being comfortable. It’s just another form of being your own god or serving them as your god.

I wish I had more time and space now to write convincingly on this. I see so many people settle for mutual benefit when they could have real love. Even people in committed relationships!

I have also seen too many people who settle for mutual benefit end their relationship because it was easier than becoming one person together. It’s easier to separate than to submit to the same active purposer.

I have a cosmos of series of books to write that will deal deeply with the need for a shared god for real love.

For now, I have to leave you with the conclusion of how love interacts with purpose, which is a pair of statements:

• If you serve yourself, then you cannot serve someone else. And that means you cannot love them.

• If you serve someone else, then no one can serve you (they would be serving that other person). And that means they cannot love you.

I came to these conclusions because I wanted to love the woman who is now my wife. I didn’t want to just have her serve me, and I didn’t want to just serve her. Neither of us could be our own god, so how could we be the other person’s god?

We needed something else that could be our god, or we couldn’t become one person.

What kind of god gives love meaning? This kind of god is the light the map leads to.

That’s where the third part of the map brings us: to a god that is bigger than we are, that allows for real love.

We’ll talk about that next week.

Footnote: I am not precluding clinical depression. Bodies are notoriously complicated systems that have lots of things go wrong. If you need help with the physical side of depression, please seek it. But solving the physical side of depression does not solve the “spiritual” side of depression that comes from a lack of meaning. Please don’t focus on one to the exclusion of the other.