"While goals are chosen, a purpose is discovered. Our purpose is something we have been doing all along, and will continue to do, regardless of circumstances, until the day we die"
About this Quote
McWilliams draws a bright, almost prosecutorial line between the tidy self-help fantasy of control and the messier truth of identity. “Goals are chosen” sounds like a planner page: deliberate, measurable, socially legible. “A purpose is discovered” flips the agency. You don’t manufacture it; you notice it, often late, by tracing your own behavioral fingerprints across time.
The line “something we have been doing all along” is the tell. Purpose, here, isn’t an inspiring slogan but a pattern you can’t quite stop repeating. That’s both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because it suggests meaning isn’t gated behind perfect conditions or a single big break; it’s already embedded in your default settings. Unsettling because it implies purpose can be inconvenient, even involuntary - less “find your passion” than “admit what keeps reasserting itself.”
McWilliams was a writer and a public advocate whose life intersected with debates about illness, autonomy, and the criminalization of relief. Read in that light, “regardless of circumstances” isn’t motivational poster grit; it’s defiance. Circumstances can constrict your options, wreck your plans, even cut your life short. They can’t easily erase the underlying impulse: to make sense, to speak, to help, to provoke.
Rhetorically, the sentence is built to outlast your excuses. It uses time (“all along,” “until the day we die”) to shame the short-term mindset and to reframe purpose as continuity. The subtext is a challenge: stop auditioning new selves and start listening to the one you keep reenacting.
The line “something we have been doing all along” is the tell. Purpose, here, isn’t an inspiring slogan but a pattern you can’t quite stop repeating. That’s both comforting and unsettling. Comforting because it suggests meaning isn’t gated behind perfect conditions or a single big break; it’s already embedded in your default settings. Unsettling because it implies purpose can be inconvenient, even involuntary - less “find your passion” than “admit what keeps reasserting itself.”
McWilliams was a writer and a public advocate whose life intersected with debates about illness, autonomy, and the criminalization of relief. Read in that light, “regardless of circumstances” isn’t motivational poster grit; it’s defiance. Circumstances can constrict your options, wreck your plans, even cut your life short. They can’t easily erase the underlying impulse: to make sense, to speak, to help, to provoke.
Rhetorically, the sentence is built to outlast your excuses. It uses time (“all along,” “until the day we die”) to shame the short-term mindset and to reframe purpose as continuity. The subtext is a challenge: stop auditioning new selves and start listening to the one you keep reenacting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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