Finding Purpose in Midlife: How to Regain Meaning
2,000 WORDS (~9 MINS READ)
When Success No Longer Feels Like a Life
Many people arrive in midlife carrying achievements they once believed would bring fulfillment. The title is earned, the salary is stable, the home is established, and the identity they spent years constructing appears intact. Yet somewhere beneath the surface something begins to shift. A quiet ache appears. A fog settles over the sense of direction. Work that once felt meaningful starts to feel hollow. Even those who appear successful from the outside may find themselves whispering the same question.
“WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?”
This moment is more than restlessness. It is an identity crisis that signals a deeper transition in your inner life. Midlife purpose work is not about building a new career. It is about remembering your deeper self and discovering the path that can carry the weight of who you have become.
I know this threshold intimately. After serving in the Marine Corps and later working in diplomatic and intelligence service across Russia, Germany, and Cyprus, I returned home with a life that looked strong but felt spiritually fractured. The outer layers of discipline and capability remained but my inner world collapsed. I no longer recognized myself. Purpose dissolved. Joy disappeared. Suicidal ideation became part of my life because I could not answer the one question that had always defined me. Why am I here?
I wrote about this part of my journey in War After War A Veteran’s Battle to Heal. It was through this unraveling that I began to recognize the deeper architecture of purpose.
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
Why Midlife Purpose Feels Urgent and Overwhelming
Many of the clients I work with reach a similar moment. They have built careers based on stability, competence, achievement, or the expectations of others. Often they have spent decades delivering value in ways that rewarded their ability to perform but neglected their deeper longings. By midlife something shifts inside. The soul begins to insist on truth. The inner world matures faster than the outer world.
This often appears as:
Loss of meaning. You wake up and realize the work you do no longer reflects your values.
Exhaustion beyond burnout. A kind of soul fatigue that sleep cannot fix.
Career misalignment. Feeling trapped in a job that no longer fits your identity.
Anxiety or depressive symptoms. Especially when the internal world feels out of sync with the external life.
A longing for contribution. A desire to make a difference that feels authentic rather than obligatory.
A quiet despair. The awareness that life is passing by without deeper fulfillment.
One of the greatest sources of suffering I hear is this. We spend most of our adult waking hours at work. If our work feels meaningless, our life begins to feel meaningless. This is why purpose is not optional. Purpose is a psychological and spiritual necessity.
Many people carry this despair silently because they feel guilty for wanting more than stability. They are not ungrateful. They are awakening.
Purpose Across Cultures: A Global Landscape of Meaning
After years of traveling, living internationally, and working across different cultures, I learned that purpose is not one thing. Purpose is a landscape. There is no universal definition. Instead, purpose expresses itself through the needs of each place and the values of each community.
Purpose as freedom. In some parts of the world purpose means freedom from hardship, oppression, or survival conditions.
Purpose as belonging. In many cultures purpose is about family, lineage, and carrying forward the stories of those who came before.
Purpose as service. Some communities define purpose by the contribution one makes to the collective.
Purpose as achievement. In many Western cultures purpose is tied to career progression and external validation.
Purpose as creativity. For some, purpose is the expression of imagination, beauty, or originality.
Purpose as awakening. For others it is the desire to grow spiritually and understand the nature of reality.
Purpose as healing. For many it is the commitment to break cycles of trauma or restore a sense of wholeness.
The most fulfilled people I have met hold purposes that are multidimensional. They include personal meaning, connection, contribution, self-knowledge, and impact.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
Inner Work of Purpose: Transformational Coaching and Identity Reconstruction
Purpose work is deeply personal. It requires reflection, honesty, and courage. Transformational coaching helps people uncover the truth beneath the identity they constructed. It supports them in seeing the invisible threads that shaped their lives and the deeper needs that drive their choices.
With clients I explore several foundational questions:
Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
This reveals the essence beneath the professional identity.What parts of yourself were sacrificed for stability, security, or belonging?
Many people lose connection to their creativity, intuition, or imagination.What longings have been ignored because they felt inconvenient or unrealistic?
These longings often point to the dormant roots of purpose.What gifts have appeared throughout your life even during difficult times?
These gifts reveal the natural qualities that want expression.
Identity crisis is often misinterpreted as confusion. In reality it is an awakening, a signal that the internal self is becoming too large for an outdated container. The goal is not to build a new identity but to align your outer life with the truth of who you already are.
When the Search for Purpose Becomes a Spiritual Crisis
For years the pursuit of purpose tormented me. Even with outward success, I often felt as if I were living in a world cracked open by suffering, conflict, and disconnection. There were moments when the world felt meaningless, when I questioned whether anything I did truly mattered. This search for purpose became one of the most active themes in my psychedelic ceremonies. It was a longing I carried into every inquiry, every breath, every prayer. When I began working closely with my guide, and now colleague and friend, Jahan Khamsehzadeh, PhD, the author of The Psilocybin Connection, a new door began to open.
Over more than a decade, Jahan has been a steady companion on this path. My long commitment to this work with him has been integral to my development both personally and professionally. He was endlessly patient with me through years of looping, questioning, doubting, and trying to find my place in the world. What began as torment slowly evolved into curiosity. What once felt like emptiness became fertile soil for a deeper calling that had been waiting beneath the surface of my life all along.
How Mushrooms Helped Me Rebuild Purpose and Meaning
Mushrooms played an essential role in helping me rebuild my relationship with purpose. They reconnected me to the earth, to my heart, and to a sense of belonging that I had lost during war and its aftermath. They helped me see my life through a wider lens that included nature, community, and the spirit of humanity.
I wrote about this in Magic Mushrooms Remembering the Sacred Intelligence of Nature.
These experiences showed me that purpose is relational. Purpose emerges through connection. Purpose grows when we reenter the living world. And purpose becomes clearer when we listen to the quiet intelligence within us.
Integration, not the ceremony itself, is what transformed my life. Integration helped me rebuild my habits, relationships, and vocational direction so that my inner truth could finally guide my outer world.
“People do not have a purpose. People serve purposes.”
Purpose as Essence: Carol Sanford and the Essence Triad
One of the most transformative teachings in my life came from an elder mentor and teacher, the late Carol Sanford. Carol taught me that people do not have a purpose. People serve purposes. This insight disrupted everything I believed about identity. Purpose is not a possession. It is not a personal badge. It is a field that we participate in, contribute to, and help evolve.
Carol’s work was shaped by profound influences, including Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Kuhn, Abraham Maslow, and her mentor, Charlie Krone, who had worked closely with Carl Jung. Her thinking was rigorous, paradigm-shifting, and deeply grounded in the study of how worldviews evolve.
She helped me understand purpose from a regenerative lens, which asks not what you want to achieve but what field of life you are here to serve. This is where the Essence Triad emerges in my work with clients:
Purpose. The evolving field you are drawn to contribute to.
Process. The natural way your essence engages with the world.
Value. The living contribution that emerges when purpose and process align.
This framework transformed how I understood my life. They were shaping essential capacities that now form the heart of my vocation.
Promise Beyond Ableness: Committing to Something Larger
A teaching Carol offered called the Promise Beyond Ableness profoundly shifted my understanding of vocation. It refers to a commitment to a purpose that is larger than your current abilities. It is the choice to participate in a field of meaning that will outlive you. It is the devotion to give your life to something that cannot be completed in your lifetime but is worth serving anyway.
For me this purpose includes the ethical evolution of psychedelic practice, policy reform, integration education, community resilience, and what I call the scientific discovery of soul. I am only one person. I cannot fulfill this alone. But I can take my place in the work. I can act in ways that contribute to the field. And I can help others find their own place within their calling.
This is purpose. Not ego. Service.
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
A Practical Reflection to Begin Your Own Purpose Work
Begin by writing down three specific experiences in your life or career when you felt fully alive. Choose memories where you felt joy internally and where others reflected that joy back to you. Purpose is rarely uncovered in isolation. It often emerges through the people who witnessed your aliveness and encouraged you to step more fully into it.
Then ask yourself:
What conditions allowed that aliveness to emerge?
This reveals the environments that support your essence.What ways did you uniquely engage?
This shows how you interact with the world in a distinctive way.What gift was being expressed through you?
Notice how your joy benefited others. This reveals what your life is preparing you to contribute.Who witnessed your joy and invited you deeper into it?
Without relational mirrors and honest accountability, we can become disillusioned. We may feel internally uplifted while unintentionally harming ourselves or others. Purpose is clarified through relationship and the impact we have on the world around us.
These reflections help illuminate the thread of purpose that has been quietly running through your entire story.
Book Recommendation: The Regenerative Life
For those wanting a deeper understanding of how purpose, contribution, and identity evolve, I often recommend one of Carol Sanford’s last books before she transitioned, The Regenerative Life. It explores how individuals can transform their work, family, and communities by understanding the roles they play in larger living systems. The book invites more reflective thinking and helps readers see the paradigms that shape their choices. It is a powerful resource for anyone seeking a clearer purpose and more coherent action.
Closing: Returning to the Path That Is Yours
Paulo Coelho once wrote that discovering purpose is not about finding a new path but remembering the one that has always been calling you. Purpose is not something you construct. Purpose is something you remember. It is the seed inside you that begins to grow once your life becomes honest enough to nourish it.
Through transformational coaching, integration, and soul-centered companionship, you can return to a life that feels aligned, meaningful, and unmistakably your own. You can rebuild purpose from the inside out. You can step into the vocation that your life has been preparing you for all along.
You can come home to your purpose.
“When you are on the right path, the universe conspires to help you.”
Begin with a brief conversation to explore if this path is right for you. If this may support someone, share it. And if you feel called, book a call.