Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist philosopher, argued that things have no fixed essence — that what we call a 'self' or a 'purpose' is actually a web of interdependencies with no stable core. Most people find this unsettling. But the German sociologist Georg Simmel picked up a structurally similar idea sixteen centuries later, noticing that individual identity only becomes legible through friction — through the places where you resist the groups and roles pressing in on you. Together, these two thinkers point at something strange about purpose: it is not something you discover inside yourself, like finding a coin in a jacket pocket. It emerges at the boundary between you and what you are not. The leader who can articulate what they will not do, the athlete who can name what they are training toward rather than away from, the person who can sit with the discomfort of an unresolved direction without filling it with busyness — these are people who have learned to locate themselves at the edge, not the center. Purpose, on this reading, is less a destination and more a tensile relationship between your commitments and everything contesting them. What clarifies it is not more introspection. It is contact with resistance.

What specific resistance — a person, a role, an expectation — have you been treating as an obstacle to your purpose, when it might actually be the thing sharpening it?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy synthesized with German sociology of form — Nagarjuna (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, c. 2nd century CE) synthesized with Georg Simmel (Soziologie, 1908)