HiddenPurpose

There is a question almost all of us have asked ourselves at some point, usually at night, usually without looking for it.

Sometimes it arrives after an ordinary day, when you’ve already turned off the light and the ceiling just stays there, waiting. Sometimes it arrives after something extraordinary: a loss, a piece of news, a hug that lasted longer than usual. And sometimes it arrives for no reason at all, simply because the human brain, left alone for a moment, tends to ask questions that are not exactly helpful for falling asleep.

What am I doing all this for?

Behind that small question there is usually a bigger one, one we rarely say out loud because it sounds far too solemn for breakfast:

Is there something behind all of this?

This book was born from that question. But it is not a book that promises to answer it. We say so here, on the first page, so as not to deceive anyone: if you are looking for the final answer, close it now and save yourself some time. What we can promise is something different, and we think better: we are going to show you how a question changes when you actually take the trouble to investigate it, instead of settling for the first hunch that comes to mind at three in the morning.

· · ·

We started, like almost everyone, with a fairly reasonable intuition. It seemed to us that a person’s life—anyone’s life, anywhere—could be described more or less like this:

First you come to know something.
Then you believe in something.
That gives you a purpose.
And that purpose leads you to act.

Knowledge, faith, purpose, action. Four words we use every day without thinking twice. “I know what I want.” “I haven’t lost faith.” “I need to find meaning in this.” “Something has to be done.” Four steps, one after the other, like a staircase anyone could climb.

It struck us as an idea so simple and so obvious that we decided to investigate it seriously. We were going to show, carefully and rigorously, that this was indeed how it worked: that knowledge leads to faith, that faith produces purpose, that purpose drives action.

That is not what we found.

· · ·

The first thing that happened was more uncomfortable than we expected: each of those four steps, looked at up close, turned out not to be a solid step at all, but a box full of smaller pieces. “Knowing” was not one thing. Neither was “believing.” Nor “having a purpose,” nor “acting.” Every word we had taken for granted opened up, like those Russian dolls that never end, into ever finer questions.

And then something even stranger happened. When we began to compare the pieces we had found inside each box, we noticed that some of them looked suspiciously like pieces from other boxes. A property that showed up when we investigated what it means to “know” showed up again, almost identical, when we investigated what it means to “have a purpose.” It was as if the four boxes, instead of being four different things stored separately, were really compartments of the same piece of furniture, and the pieces had been slipping from one to another over time.

That was when the question changed. It was no longer “does knowledge lead to faith?” It was another one, more unsettling and, for us, far more interesting:

What if knowledge, faith, purpose, and action were not four different things, but different ways of naming something deeper that we still don’t know what to call?

· · ·

This book tells that journey. It is not a novel, although at times it reads like one: there are discoveries, there are dead ends, there is a moment when a court of three judges produces a ruling that none of the three would have signed on their own, and there is a bacterium that seems to guess the future without having anything resembling a brain. Nor is it a self-help book: it won’t tell you how to find your purpose in five steps, because by the time you finish reading it you will understand why that promise, made with such simplicity, probably cannot be honestly kept.

It is, if anything, the record of a real investigation: that of two people—we, Rufo y Rufo—who began with a comfortable question and ended with a more precise one, a stranger one and, we believe, a far more honest one.

We are not going to give away the ending. But we can tell you, right now, something we only understood once we had finished: the question we started with was not exactly wrong. It was just too simple for what we were really looking for.

Come along. We’re going to show you where it took us.

· · ·

First, to know.
Then, to believe.
Finally, to act.
Or so we thought.