I’m trying to work out what matters now.

There are points in life when the things that motivated us for years become slightly less convincing.

That doesn’t necessarily mean we have stopped caring about them. You can still want the career, the money, the relationship, the recognition, the family, the freedom or whatever else you have spent years building towards. The change can be much quieter than that. The things themselves remain important, but perhaps they no longer answer quite as many questions as they once did.

This is where conversations about “purpose” can become unnecessarily grand. We are encouraged to identify the thing we were put on earth to do, as though somewhere there is a correct answer and the rest of our lives will fall neatly into place once we discover it.

I’m not sure life works like that.

What matters to us changes. Something can dominate one decade and barely register in the next. Ambition can become more important, then less important, then important again for completely different reasons. Relationships change what we value. So do loss, success, disappointment, age and simply having lived long enough to discover that some of the things we were promised would make us happy actually do, while others turn out to be surprisingly uninteresting once we have them.

Perhaps the more useful question is not “What is my purpose?” but “What deserves more of my life now?”

Where are you currently giving time, energy or attention because something matters to you, and where are you giving those things simply because you always have?

And if the next few years did not need to prove anything about you, what would you want them to contain more of?

There does not have to be a dramatic answer. Sometimes reconsidering what matters changes the direction of a life. Sometimes it changes how we spend a Tuesday evening. Both count.