Create your reason

I believe that each and every one us is here for a reason.

Go ahead: Get it out of your system. Roll your eyes, luxuriously wallow in cynicism for a moment – and then consider what tends to happen to those that have no great, abiding reason to be here. They sink, ineluctably, into depression. Life seems to pass them by. They feel powerless, hopeless and, finally, come to see themselves as refugees from life; not creators of lives.

We know that we need friends, security, stability, status and respect if we are to have a fighting chance at glimmers of contentment, delight and joy. Yet there is a truer need still: a reason to live fully, wholly, searingly. Each and every one of us needs a reason for the most pragmatic of reasons: to evoke the best, noblest and truest in us; and so to persevere in the pursuit of lives well lived.

Here are my five tiny rules for creating your reason:

TOTAL SURRENDER: If you want to live a worth living, you have to do a lot (lot) more than merely wish for it: You have to work for it. And not merely in the brain-dead sense of working 80 hours a week at a job you hate. I mean work for it in a more profound sense: You must work to create a reason that demands from you nothing less than the furious, uncompromising pursuit of a life well lived.

ABSOLUTE CLARITY: A reason is not a purpose. Imagine you were a master stonemason. Your purpose might be to build a great cathedral. But your reason might be to approach the divine, to leave a legacy, or simply to do great work. A purpose, then, is a set of accomplishments – but a reason is the animating force behind them.

REAL LIFE: Your reason isn’t found, or discovered. It is created. It is the great act of a life; the culminating act that joins our choices and decisions into a trajectory

that resonates. A purpose is what you make: a book, a company, a bonus. A reason is what you live: knowledge, art, enlightenment and more. What do you want your life to be? What is it that you want to live? When it comes not just to stuff, but to life, what is that you want to enact?

RADICAL SIMPLICITY: The timeless truths of life, which reasons exist to illuminate, are deceptively simple. So, forgive me, beancounters, but a reason is not a corporate mission statement (‘’To leverage my educational assets and optimize my career path!!’’). It is the very opposite: a radically simple statement of why your life matters enough to you to fully, dangerously live it … past the edge.

BRUTAL HONESTY: Not all reasons are created equal. And you probably can’t create a worthy one if you’re not brutally honest with yourself about it. Raising a family and imbuing it with love; this is a grand and timeless reason; it elevates life. Pixar’s reason: creating heartwarming stories that bring people of all ages together? Works for me. Making minigames for advertisers to sell stuff to people they don’t really want to buy with money they don’t really have to live lives they don’t really feel? That’s a sucky reason, because it impoverishes life. Of course, the minigame maker might feel, in the moment, his work is rewarding – and it may be lucrative. But it isn’t likely to feel whole, for the simple reason that it’s reason is wanting in terms of meaningful human outcomes.

Not all of us successfully create our reasons. But that is precisely why we must try. For it is in the reasonless that we see the power of life’s reason: the reason gives sense to life, and without sense, life feels like a maze, a trap, a game, an absurdity. We need a reason because our reasons are what liberate us from lives that feel senseless.

(Umair Haque is the director of Havas Media Labs and author of “Betterness: Economics for Humans” and “The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business.”)