What It Has to Do with Life Purpose
When people first arrive at Spiral Path, they probably wonder why a life-purpose site includes articles about cultural change, dominant paradigms, sensitivity, economics, spirituality, and even the future of work. Isn’t life purpose supposed to be personal? Isn’t it about goals, strengths, values, and inner transformation?
It is – but only partly.
The truth is that we don’t find our purpose in a vacuum. We live inside systems that shape how we think, feel, behave, and imagine our possibilities. Culture forms the backdrop against which every personal decision is made. It influences what we believe is normal, desirable, realistic, or out of reach. It quietly determines which parts of us flourish and which parts get pushed to the margins.
If we never name the culture we’re living in, we risk believing that our struggles are purely personal failings. But many people today are not lost they are simply trying to grow within a system that doesn’t support the things humans need to thrive.
This is why cultural understanding is essential to life purpose work.
Life Purpose in Context
When I write about the dominant paradigm – the mindset of competition, extraction, endless productivity, and self-optimisation – I’m naming the invisible forces that shape how we make meaning in the modern world. This paradigm affects how we perceive success, how we relate to time, how we think about worth, and even how we treat our bodies and our emotional lives.
For a sensitive, thoughtful, reflective person, these pressures can feel overwhelming. It’s common to internalise the idea that you’re “not enough,” “too slow,” “too emotional,” or “not resilient enough.” Yet these judgments come from a cultural environment that prizes certain traits and suppresses others. When people discover that their struggles have systemic roots, not personal deficiencies, they often feel immense relief – and a renewed sense of clarity about who they really are.
Purpose work becomes much deeper when we understand this context. Instead of trying to force ourselves into shapes that don’t fit, we begin asking different questions: What kind of person is this culture shaping me to be? And is that who I want to become?
Why Cultural Change Is Part of the Purpose Journey
Purpose is not only about what we do; it is also about how we live and who we are becoming. When people come for life purpose guidance, they are often yearning for more space, gentler rhythms, more authenticity, and a life aligned with their own values rather than cultural expectations.
But to reclaim these things, we must first see the wider patterns that constrain us.
Writing about cultural change helps illuminate those patterns. It allows people to recognise that their longing for meaning is not just an individual longing – it is part of a collective shift. Many of us are waking up to the idea that the old story of domination, extraction, and relentless striving is no longer sustainable, nor does it reflect the deeper truth of who we are.
Cultural change is not abstract. It shows up in the way we work, how we relate to one another, how we care for our communities, and how we make sense of the world. When we understand this, the purpose journey becomes richer: it moves beyond self-improvement and becomes a way of participating in the emergence of a healthier, more humane culture.
The Spiral Path Approach
Spiral Path is not conventional life coaching. I’m not here to push people toward constant productivity or narrow versions of success. My work focuses on deeper life design: meaning, values, personal rhythms, narrative, and cultivating your best self within a world that often pulls you away from yourself.
This means exploring the interplay between:
- your inner landscape
- your personal history
- your sensitivity and temperament
- the cultural forces that shape you
- the future you feel called toward
Understanding culture helps people make sense of their place in the wider story. It supports them in designing lives that are both personally meaningful and aligned with the kind of world they want to help create.
An Invitation to Look Beneath the Surface
If my writing ranges across topics – from sensitivity to economics, from archetypes to the future of work – it is because all of these threads touch the question that sits at the heart of the Spiral Path:
How do we live a meaningful, humane, self-directed life in a culture that often pulls us in the opposite direction?
Exploring cultural change is not a departure from life purpose. It is one of its most important foundations.
Through this work, I hope to offer a space where you can breathe, reflect, and rediscover your own way of being – not the one culture prescribes, but the one your deeper self knows to be true.
If these themes speak to you, you may enjoy my Cultural Shift and Collective Purpose book reviews – a growing collection of reflections on writers who are challenging the old paradigms and imagining new futures.