The Purpose Trap: Why Your Roadmap Is Failing You

You’ve been sold a lie about purpose.

Not deliberately. Not maliciously. But a lie all the same.

The story goes like this: climb the ladder, tick the boxes, hit the milestones, and eventually if you work hard enough, purpose will be waiting at the top. That perfect moment when you finally arrive and everything clicks.

But purpose doesn’t strike like a lightning bolt at the summit. It isn’t hiding at the end of a checklist. It shows up in the sparks along the way: the conversations, the rituals, the choices, the connections. You’ve felt it before. You just didn’t call it purpose.

And here is the part nobody tells you. Those tidy frameworks we’ve been handed don’t hold anymore.

Maslow’s pyramid promised that once you climbed to the peak, self-actualisation would be waiting. Simon Sinek told us if we cracked our “why,” everything else would unlock. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey convinced us struggle follows a script: leave home, slay the dragon, return transformed.

Different models. Same promise. Do the steps, get the prize.

They sounded inspiring. But always just out of reach.

We bought into them because linear maps make chaos feel manageable. A becomes B. B becomes C. Follow the rules, get the reward.

But life doesn’t work like that anymore. And you already knew that.

We’re not living in a straight line anymore. We’re living in the Age of Emergence.

For most of history, we told ourselves life followed a three-act script: good, then bad, then good again. The fall and the redemption. The storm and the calm.

But emergence doesn’t play by that structure. It’s what happens when chaos collides and creates something no one planned. Cities grow their own rhythms beyond any planner’s design. The internet gives rise to communities nobody predicted. AI jumps from lab experiment to 400 million users in a single year, reshaping how we live, work, and play.

Collapse and creation don’t wait their turn. They happen at the same time.

One world unravels while another takes shape in the same breath. Industries crack open while new opportunities sprout in the rubble. The rules aren’t rewritten after the storm. They’re rewritten inside it.

The cracks are everywhere, in our systems, in our work, in us. Burnout is baseline. Jobs vanish overnight. The planet itself is running a fever.

And yet, in the same moment, something else is forming. New jobs. New skills. New ways of working and living. Conversations we never used to have. Doors that were once bolted shut finally opening.

This is the paradox: everything is breaking and building at once.

And that’s exactly why the old, linear maps of purpose don’t work anymore.

Maybe you’re reading this at midnight, scrolling instead of sleeping. Wondering how the hell you’re supposed to lead when nothing adds up anymore.

You tell your team AI will make their jobs easier. Meanwhile, you’re sketching out who gets cut. You stand on stage talking purpose and sustainability. The board only wants to talk revenue.

And your people? They see it. They hear the gap between what you say and what you can actually deliver. They want to believe their work matters. They want to trust you. But Gallup says only one in five employees strongly trust their leadership. That’s not on you. That’s the system.

So they leave. Not because you’re failing, but because they think purpose is waiting somewhere else. The irony? They’ll find the same contradictions in another office with a different logo.

Here’s the part you’ve been avoiding: you’re waiting for the contradictions to resolve. They won’t.

We keep treating purpose like some grand mission we’re meant to discover. But in complexity, that story doesn’t help anyone. It leaves people drowning, staring at a roadmap that no longer matches the terrain.

That’s the real issue. The map was drawn for a world that moved in straight lines. Today the ground keeps shifting under your feet. You can’t follow a route when the landmarks are gone.

It’s not that you don’t care enough. It’s that you’re running on the wrong operating system. Purpose built for certainty doesn’t work in a world of flux.

That’s why purpose needs an upgrade. Not as a single mission at the end of the road, but as a living system that adapts while everything around you changes.

Because in the Age of Emergence, waiting for certainty means waiting forever.

Purpose isn’t a grand mission carried by a lone hero. It’s the ladder that leads nowhere.

The truth? Purpose is fluid. Situational. Contextual. It shifts with what’s breaking and what’s being born. It shows up in the choices you make about what matters most right now. Not someday, but today. Right here, in the middle of the mess.

The Japanese concept of ikigai understood this long before we did, though we’ve badly mistranslated it in the West.

True ikigai isn’t that viral Venn diagram. Real ikigai is simpler: your reason to wake up in the morning. Tea with a friend. The quiet joy of tending a garden. The small rituals that make life worth living.

Ken Mogi, a Japanese neuroscientist, says his ikigai is watching butterflies on his morning runs in Tokyo. It makes no money. Builds no status. And that’s exactly the point. Purpose doesn’t need the world’s permission.

Maybe your purpose right now isn’t a career pivot or a world-changing mission. Maybe it’s showing up for your kid’s bedtime. Making your colleague laugh. Finally taking that walk you keep postponing. The small acts that keep you tethered when everything else is spinning.

That’s not settling. That’s wisdom.

But here’s the edge. Ikigai grew out of a culture that prized continuity and harmony. Today’s reality is different: climate shocks, AI disruption, political upheaval, systems under constant pressure. We need purpose that holds two truths at once, the grounding simplicity of daily rituals and the flexibility to evolve when everything shifts.

We need purpose that works like DNA. A living code designed to adapt without losing its core.

Fast enough to respond to collapse. Flexible enough to create renewal. Solid enough to keep you oriented when everything else is moving.

So here’s what matters now.

Purpose isn’t waiting at the end of a line. It’s not a destination, a story arc, or a heroic mission you’ll stumble on someday.

Purpose is how you show up in the fractures of your life and your world, weaving renewal through collapse.

It’s the choices you make about what deserves your attention today. Not five years from now. Today. In the middle of the storm. It’s how you use your influence when everything feels uncertain. It’s the impact you create not despite the chaos, but inside it.

You don’t need perfect clarity to live purposefully. You don’t need the perfect plan or the perfect title.

You need to stop treating purpose as something distant you’ll eventually discover, and start recognising it as something alive you create moment by moment.

The ladder was always a lie. The linear path was always an illusion.

In the Age of Emergence, purpose lives in the cracks. That’s where you build it, one choice at a time.

So stop waiting for the lightning bolt.

Choose one thing, just one, that matters to you right now. Not your life’s grand mission. Just what deserves your attention today. Write it down. Say it out loud. Act on it before the day ends.

That’s not a someday purpose. That’s a decision. And decisions are how living purpose begins.

Rebecca | DNA Of Purpose

www.rebeccamaklad.com