Stop looking for your purpose.

Start with intention instead. I’ll show you why,

Yesterday morning, I saw a woman announce on Threads that she was officially retired. She had barely stepped across the threshold before the questions came tumbling out: Now what am I supposed to do with myself? What will my purpose be? How do I find it?

The responses were predictable. Volunteer. Take a class. Go hiking. Join a group. Travel. Find a hobby. Get involved in your community.

In other words, she retired from one assignment sheet and everybody rushed to hand her another one.

I found myself wondering why we are in such a hurry to find purpose in retirement. For most of our adult lives, somebody needed something from us. Employers, children, husbands, households, aging parents. We knew where to be, what needed doing and what would happen if we failed to handle it.

Usefulness became so tangled up with identity that when all that needing suddenly quiets down, freedom can feel remarkably like disorientation.

So we fill the space.

There is nothing wrong with volunteering or traveling or taking a class. Any of those things can make a life richer. But activity is not automatically purpose, and a full calendar is not proof that a life matters.

I think we may be starting with the wrong question.

Instead of asking, “What is my purpose now?” I am far more interested in asking, “How do I intend to live?”

How do I want my life to feel? Peaceful? Curious? Creative? Adventurous? Unhurried? Satisfying? What kind of relationship do I want with my time? What do I want more of now that so much of my life no longer belongs to somebody else?

I believe purpose follows intention.

I know that because it happened to me.

Substack was not anywhere on my bingo card. I didn’t know anything about it. I wasn’t planning to become a writer, build a publication or gather thousands of women around something called The Daily RE-Wire.

What I had decided was how I wanted to live.

I wanted a life that felt satisfying, and I wanted curiosity to have a large place in it.

So for a few weeks, that was what I thought about. Satisfaction. Curiosity. Not what I should accomplish with them. Not how I could monetize them. Not what impressive new identity I could construct around

So for a few weeks, that was what I thought about. Satisfaction. Curiosity. Not what I should accomplish with them. Not how I could monetize them. Not what impressive new identity I could construct around them.

I simply paid attention.

And I began noticing what I was curious about.

I started writing little 100- and 200-word missives on Facebook about the things I was thinking about. There was no strategy behind them. I was following my own interest.

Then one of those little pieces caught the attention of a woman who would eventually become one of the strongest supporters of my work and buy a large painting from me. She told me why the painting mattered so much to her, and in the process she told me about a dream of her own, a book she wanted to publish but could not seem to bring into reality.

Her story stayed with me.

And there came curiosity again.

I wondered how many other women were sitting on dreams they had postponed while raising families, building careers, taking care of everybody else and doing all the things responsible women were supposed to do.

I wondered what might happen if somebody encouraged those women to go back and take another look.

About two days later, The Daily RE-Wire was born.

I began writing about retirement without the usual prescriptions about what women our age ought to be doing. I wanted to talk about the freedom to reconsider our lives, reclaim abandoned dreams and decide for ourselves what would make these years satisfying.

That was January 2024.

Today, September 22, 2026, there are 7,500 subscribers here, and I am still somewhat astonished by the whole thing.

Helping women discover how to create a satisfying life in retirement has become a purpose in my life.

But I could never have gone looking for that purpose because I did not know it existed.

It appeared after I decided how I wanted to live.

That is the distinction I think we have missed.

Purpose does not always need to be hunted down like a missing set of car keys. Sometimes we establish an intention, become quiet enough to notice what interests us, and begin following the breadcrumbs.

Curiosity leads somewhere. Creativity leads somewhere. Peace leads somewhere. Connection leads somewhere.

And the somewhere does not have to become a business, a movement, a nonprofit or a second career. Purpose does not have to impress anybody. It may simply become the organizing principle that makes your life feel like your own.

We spent decades becoming extraordinarily good at doing.

Retirement may be our chance to become equally interested in being.

So I am not terribly interested in telling a newly retired woman to hurry up and find her purpose.

I want to know something else first.

How does she intend to feel while she is living the rest of her life?

Start there.

Purpose has a rather remarkable way of catching up.

I’ve created a little two-page worksheet to help you do this for yourself.

It will walk you through what you no longer want your life to feel like, the moments when you have felt most like yourself, and the three words that might begin to define how you intend to live now. From there, you’ll shape those words into an intention you can actually use.

You do not have to have the answers before you begin. That is the whole point of the worksheet.

Paid subscribers are eligible to get the worksheet as a download on the PERKS page.Just click the PDF download it, and give yourself a little quiet time with it.

And please do not rush it. This is not homework. It is a conversation with yourself.