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What Am I Actually For? Finding Purpose Living in Groundhog Day · The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to the VoyageCast.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Eddie, your host, as always, and I've been thinking about purpose.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: You see, a lot of folks I work with and a lot of what I see in our culture is this struggle with identity and purpose and meaning and all those kinds of things.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: It may not always be an explicit struggle or an explicit concern, sometimes it really is, but it comes up in my office about as much as anything else.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Even today I had somebody who was struggling with this exact problem.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what might be a harder question is this sort of day-to-day issue of purpose, the thing that gets us through the next five minutes or hour of our life.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what am I actually supposed to be doing on any given day when I wake up and make coffee and go to work and come home tired and the repetition continues?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And is this repetition purposeful?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Does Groundhog Day eventually lead to something more?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what we're going to talk about today.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to start it off with, and you, if you know me well enough, you know that I kind of weave in through my Christian kind of faith background with some of this stuff, but stick with me on it, okay?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to start with considering kind of the biblical story, uh, basically from beginning to end.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to get into a bunch of the minutia of it, but just consider it from the beginning to end.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And in the beginning, it starts with uh God walking with a couple of people he just made.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And it ends in revelation with God living among all his people once again.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, most of what's in between that beginning and end, those bookend portions of it, uh, is people sort of wandering off and God trying to bring them back.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have children, I'm sure that you can relate to this in some capacity, right?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Your children will veer off the path of life that you think is best for them, and then you're trying to bring them back to the path that is right, good, and true, let's say.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were to ask me um what we're here for, like what's the purpose of this all, uh, I kind of have a simple answer to this, and you may not like it, you may not agree, and that's fine.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but my simple answer is this is that I think we're made to be with God ultimately.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I really believe that, but it doesn't tell you much about what to do at three in the afternoon or as I'm recording this at 1241 in the afternoon.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't tell you like right now what is in the moment that I'm doing stuff, like what's my purpose.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And if, again, faith isn't your thing, totally fine.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Stick around anyway, because I think the clinical research on what we're going to talk about today, I think it really ends up, they all kind of coalesce into the same place, if that makes sense.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the research end of this, we're going to get into attachment theory, okay, because I think that's the most substantial way to consider this.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's also one of the most studied areas in my field.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: John Bowby, if you haven't heard about him, he spent most of uh the 40s and 50s looking at kids who'd been separated from their caregivers, and his work changed how we think about children today.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Around the same time, we had Renee Spitz, who was studying babies in institutions who were basically orphaned.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he was looking at the babies that were fed and kept clean and warm, and you know, basically getting all of their physical needs covered.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he was comparing that to those that had the physical needs covered and who were also held.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the ones that they found in the study who who weren't held much did fail to thrive.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, they they died.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I tend to say that attachment theory really proves that we were made for connection, especially studies like that, where when you're not held and you're not bonded with somebody, you're not connected, people do pass when they don't have that kind of you know attachment meaning and purpose, let's say.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: And and that starts very young.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's too strong of a statement for me to say that this proves we're made for connection.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: But again, these infant research studies and and they were barbaric studies, but these studies do show about as close as we can get to cause and effect.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: With adults um and and and loneliness research, uh, we keep finding that isolation tends to carry along or or coalesce with declining health or worse health and even suicide.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, consider just your life and the people you know right now.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you probably know people directly who've attempted, who are curious about suicide, or who have committed suicide.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a pretty pervasive problem.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Joyner, who has spent his career studying suicide, names what he calls quote, thwarted belongingness as one of the core pieces.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the sense that you don't really belong anywhere.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: The other piece in his model is feeling like a burden to the people around you.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have worked with me, then you know my thoughts on burden.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever brought that up, you know, we're human beings, we're all meant to be burdens, right?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we do life together.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we abond and attach, so we can share burdens.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody's a burden at some point, so we got to share them.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: In the scriptures, we see that we're made specifically to be with God.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the research says we are made to be with each other.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really see these as competing issues.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I see these as coalescing or complementary.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Somewhere along the way, I heard someone say that uh our job day to day is simply to present ourselves as we are in the world, meaning our gifts, our failings, our warts, our wounds, whatever, our heart, mind, and soul uh brought into the room without editing anything.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now that is hard, I understand.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's certainly harder than it sounds.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And for most of us, including myself at times, uh we put a lot of energy into kind of image management.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: We show the gifts and we hide the failings.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then we feel lonely around people who actually like us, but we feel lonely because what they like is what we show them.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it might be a true part of us, but it's not all of us, and that can become problematic.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Some of what gets called an identity struggle comes from living living in that uh managed version long enough that you truly lose track of what's underneath the presentation, right?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: And where where I'd push on this is that presence by itself can even get passive.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you are starting to show yourself, you can be kind of fully honest in sort of name only.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and even sometimes I would say going a step further, people can share who they are as a way of defending and keeping people out of knowing what's underneath and behind all that.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it sort of looks like I'm being vulnerable and honest, but I'm not allowing you to really know me or even have impact in my life.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the way I have been putting it is that our purpose on any given day is to be connected and generative.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: So what does that mean?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh connected means actually being known, seen, heard by God, by the people you trust, uh, but the real you, the broken you, the hurt you, the wonderful you, everything about you, the warts, the wounds, all of it, right?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Generative means I bring my best to the degree that I understand or can to the people around me.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And little by little it grows me, which plants the seed that I can then be known by those who are willing and then and more fully uh received, let's say, by God.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: In Eric Erickson's words, uh, he he thinks this, you know, it's where kind of the word generative typically comes from, at least the way we understand it psychology.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: He used it uh for a stage uh for middle adulthood, you know, roughly in your 40s uh through your 60s.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of, I'm 45, so that's where it is for me, where the work is uh caring for what comes after you, like raising kids or mentoring or building something that lasts.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the strength he tied to that stage was care.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: The other side of it he called stagnation, which is basically getting absorbed in yourself.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: That could be also kind of depression if you live there too long.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I keep all of that and I like to stretch it a little bit further definitionally.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it waits until midlife, this generativity idea.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it isn't only about the next generation.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I think it includes the person in front of you today.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I expand on this a little bit.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of my take.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd count conversations where somebody leaves a little bit more hopeful or an apology that took some nerve to really get it out of you, or even just sitting in a car with your teenager and not trying to fix everything, uh, especially if you're a dude, right?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And just loving them through it.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think that could be generative.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Dan McAdams picked up Erickson's work and found that highly generative adults tend to tell their life stories as redemption stories.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: So they see more meaning and purpose in it, where something hard ends up turning towards something good, some difficulty, some tragedy, there ends up being a good that comes from it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that's close to the story I think that scripture tells from the garden on, right?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: That we started with.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for me, I need both.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, if I'm close to people but not giving anything, the the relationships start to be about my comfort.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the other way it can go wrong is being too busy and productive without anybody really knowing you, right?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And some of what people bring into my office about purpose and meeting looks a bit like that.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and this is where also joiner's second piece comes back in.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Feeling like a burden uh is close to the opposite of generative.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's the belief that people around you would be better off without what you bring, which is unfortunate.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: We impact people in ways that we could not possibly know.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you guys remember the Groundhog movie?
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if not, check it out.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It is hilarious.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but we'll use a little bit of that as uh kind of a stepping off point into this next part.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: So Groundhog Day, I think, presents a good picture.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Phil Connors, your main character, wakes up on the same day over and over and over again.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And for long stretches, he used it just for himself, self-indulgently.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and it even gets dark at different points where he attempts suicide and then wakes up the next morning, he becomes empty.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Things eventually start to turn around, though, when he uh turns toward the people in the town.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: He starts learning piano, he fixes a flat tire for the old ladies, he catches a kid falling out of a tree, and he actually gets to know Rita, this woman that he cares about.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: The day itself stays the same the whole time.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: But what changes is what he does with that day, right?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: He's generative, he finds meaning and purpose in it, he starts connecting.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Most of our days, if we're honest, uh, for the average person, I would be in that community, are fairly repetitive.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Whether that repetit repetition is purposeful has a lot to do with whether or not we're actually connected to people and we're generative inside those days.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to bring this to another way of thinking about it, and we'll call it the offering.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Back to the scriptures, Paul tells the church in Rome to present their bodies as living sacrifices, uh, which I take to mean the whole and ordinary life, not just Sunday, not just the mask or or the good behaviors.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he calls this like the all of you, bringing all of you, the ordinary life, everything.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: He calls that a type of worship.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: In Colossians, he says, Whatever you do, do it heartily as if it's for the Lord.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now I come back to the drummer boy often.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of my favorite songs for Christmas, and I come back to it because it speaks to what we're talking about today.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: This little boy shows up to the manger with nothing to give except his drum and to play it.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now it would be easy to hear, you know, bring your best.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and he kind of does, like he brings whatever he can.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I think sometimes we interpret bring your best as bring something that's polished and well rehearsed.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't read the drummer boy that way.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't hear the song that way.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody even says that he's a good drummer, although the song and when people are performing it, there's some good drumming.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: But he brings whatever it is he has and and he brings all of it.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, which looks a lot like presenting yourself just as you are unto the Lord, as as Paul would say.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: All your failings, everything included.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it happens on the repeat, right?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every day, same thing.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's where all this life is lived.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want to take, if you want something to take into this week, if you want something really practical, to at least start moving the needle again, nothing I present on any of these podcast episodes is going to be a definitive solution for your life or for your life's struggles.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's that's impossible.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's just not a possibility.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to take another tool from this episode, here is something practical that you can bring into your world and start asking yourself so you can start developing more awareness uh and more sense and presence about the the life that you live.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if if you're struggling with this, these are good starting questions.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And these aren't condemning questions, these are just questions to observe, explore, and be curious about.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Where was I actually known today?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it whatever interactions you had, did somebody actually take the time to know you, or did you volunteer being known?
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Did anything grow today or change or get better or develop or move a little bit on that kind of needle of health?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because you were there, because you were involved.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other question would be is where did I hold back because I didn't feel good enough or believe that I had nothing to offer?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a farce.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has something to offer.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: I had a pastor tell me one time that anybody could be his mentor.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: It could be a homeless guy in the streets, it could be a drug addict who smacked out of his head, it could be his neighbor, it could be his wife, it could be his kids.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody could be his mentor.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's true, as long as you're paying attention.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in a season where you're not sure who you are or what you're for, I don't, like I said, I can't fix that.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I have no quick fix to give you.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to start paying attention to where we are known and where our life is and what's going on so we can start connecting those dots.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be interested in things, right?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because interesting people are interested in things.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that means they're involved in stuff.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: That means they're involved in community and they're involved in such a way that they can be known, seen, heard, loved, cared about, trusted, supported, or give all those things to somebody else, which is generative too, right?
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's a reciprocal experience.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, every day can feel like Groundhog's Day.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and those are the days, especially that we have to be mindful of.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this is helpful for you.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this is bringing some insight and understanding to your life.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you can share this information with somebody if you know that they might be struggling with some of this stuff.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I recognize there's I can't solve every problem on a podcast episode.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even possible.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I'd love to hear your thoughts.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Share them.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can shoot me an email, all that stuff, all the contact information is in my show notes.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can hit me up on the socials, all that stuff.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, all those links are in there.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the algorithm overlords, I say this in every episode, but it's a true thing.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: They need you to share this, they need you to like it, they need you to do all the things, okay, and especially subscribe because that tells the algorithms that people want to know about this and it starts spreading the word, and maybe we're spreading something helpful.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, like give it a shot.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't cost you anything.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking for anything from you other than that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, take care.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, oh, one more thing.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: If uh you are local and you need help from one of our counselors of Voyages Counseling in the Denver metro area, we do have support for people here.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Feel free to contact us.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and again, all the links to everything you need are gonna be in the show notes or description of the video depending on how you're considering it.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, thank you guys so much for joining me on another episode of Void Cast.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.