My Purpose in a Noisy World

In a world constantly asking us what we do, I have slowly started wondering who we are becoming underneath all of it. Most of us have been living within the mindset that our success is measured solely by material possessions and external validation. That success is valid only when something is achieved, a trajectory that has already been laid out by the world around us. It’s not even entirely our fault that we think this way. This is what we have constantly been exposed to growing up. However, amidst all of this noise, I realized how little access many of us truly have to our real sense of purpose.

From the time I can remember having memories, I have always been the most ambitious and career-driven kid among the people around me. I became deeply obsessed with building the perfect career path, reaching milestones, and creating a version of success that looked impressive from the outside. Slowly, other parts of life started fading away for me. At one point, I was so focused on building a career that I started seeing my personal life, relationships, and even moments of rest as barriers standing in the way of where I wanted to be. I genuinely believed this was my purpose. I did not know how to define purpose outside of achievement because achievement had become my entire identity.

After I completed my Bachelor’s degree, I remember structuring so much of my life around getting into GC school that everything else slowly became secondary. Relationships, rest, hobbies, even my own emotional wellbeing often felt like distractions rather than parts of a meaningful life. I felt shut down from living in the present. Being called ambitious slowly became one of the biggest parts of my identity, and I started protecting that image at the cost of parts of myself.

As days and years passed, there was a quiet hint of suffocation and restlessness growing underneath everything I was building. The world I had carefully constructed for myself slowly started feeling unreal. I kept thinking to myself: I am doing everything right. Everyone around me is chasing the same things. Why does this suddenly feel so strange and disconnected?

At some point, I was told this could be spiritual disconnection. I tried reconnecting with God, hoping that maybe faith would automatically bring me peace and make everything feel lighter again. But even that journey initially felt confusing to me. I still felt lost, unsettled, and disconnected from myself. On deeper reflection, I realized that perhaps I had spent most of my life attaching myself to things that looked meaningful externally but did not fully align internally. I was constantly chasing things I thought I was supposed to want, without ever pausing long enough to ask myself whether I truly wanted them in the first place.

Who was I doing all of this for? Why was I running so hard? Even my relationship with religion started becoming a question I had to sit with honestly. Did I want to reconnect with faith because my soul genuinely longed for it, or because I was told that this is what would “fix” me and make life better?

Slowly, reconnecting with the Divine stopped feeling like something I was doing because I was told it would ‘fix’ my life. I began becoming more mindful of my relationship with God and the intentions behind the way I was living my life. During this period, I enrolled in a Qur’an study program focused on understanding its deeper meanings, and for the first time in a long while, I felt like I genuinely belonged in that space.

I convinced myself that once I got into genetic counseling school and eventually became a genetic counselor, things would finally feel complete. And in many ways, things did get better. I was learning constantly and felt intellectually stimulated by all the different cases, conditions, and people I was meeting. There was excitement in finally stepping into something I had worked so hard toward. But despite all of that, something deep inside me kept quietly gnawing at me.

I thought the empty void would disappear once I graduated and passed my boards, but even after reaching those milestones, something still felt unsettled. Not necessarily unhappy, but not fully at peace either. And it was only after I passed boards and sat down during this uncertain stage of trying to figure out my path in a difficult job market that I finally heard my inner voice more clearly than ever before. Somewhere in all that uncertainty, I realized that maybe my deeper purpose was not simply to achieve endlessly, but to care for myself, nurture meaningful connections, and build community.

Ironically, I do not think I would have discovered this if life had continued following the exact societal trajectory I originally planned for myself. Instead, life threw me into seasons of uncertainty, pauses, unknowns, disappointments, and questions I did not have immediate answers to. And somewhere within all of that discomfort, I slowly began reflecting on what it actually means to live with a higher sense of purpose.

The things that slowly started reconnecting me to myself were often the quietest ones. Slowing down, sitting in silence, prayer, writing, community, serving others, facing my own health challenges, reconnecting with God on my own terms and through my own choice rather than through pressure or expectations from others, realizing that peace mattered more than constant achievement, and learning that my worth was not tied only to productivity and output.

Slowing down initially felt terrifying to me because I had spent most of my life equating rest with being unproductive, and being unproductive with laziness. This required me to slowly rebuild many parts of my life. Physically, it looked like taking care of my health through more movement and nourishing food, reconnecting with family and friends, going on quiet walks in nature, exploring creative avenues through writing and art, and allowing myself to rest without attaching guilt to it (hardest, still working on this!). Spiritually, it meant learning how to reconnect with God honestly rather than performatively. Emotionally, it meant confronting the uncomfortable and bitter truth that I had tied so much of my worth to achievement for most of my life.

I have also started seeing how deeply this search for purpose can affect people navigating chronic illness, sudden diagnoses, or seasons of life that force them to slow down unexpectedly. When someone’s entire identity has been built around productivity, independence, or future plans, illness can suddenly create anxiety, resentment, grief, and disorientation. It forces people to pause, adapt, and rebuild their lives in ways they never anticipated. And in many ways, I think helping patients reconnect with a meaningful sense of purpose despite these disruptions becomes just as important as helping them medically navigate the diagnosis itself.

Your purpose may not always come in the form of a title, visibility, productivity, or constant achievement. Sometimes purpose is much quieter than that. Sometimes it is simply a soft pull toward the things that align your body, mind, and soul while keeping you grounded. Sometimes purpose is caring for your family, working on your health, writing or expressing words that comfort someone else, advocating for patients, healing yourself, being present, serving quietly, walking with sincerity, or simply building a meaningful life.

There is often very little external validation for these quieter forms of purpose. They may not always look impressive or productive from the outside, and at times they can even feel unworthy of our time and energy. But I genuinely believe they are some of the deepest and most important forms of work we will ever do. The slow and steady work of becoming whole, reconnecting with ourselves, and returning to what truly matters. And that work counts. It matters more than we think.

Perhaps that is why quietness is so crucial in a noisy world, much like how birds retreat to their nests after chirping throughout the day. The chirping is life unfolding loudly around us, but the quietness is where we return to ourselves and reconnect with purpose.